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In early 2024, Visual AIDS hired our first full-time Community Archivist. An integral part of the Visual AIDS team, Jacs Rodriguez holds a Master of Library and Information Sciences degree from Pratt Institute and has worked to increase access to the holdings of the Visual AIDS Archive. Jacs and Kyle Croft recently spoke about the Visual AIDS archive on Hauser & Wirth Institute’s podcast, “Conversations in the Archives.” Below, Jacs shares more about the finding aids they published this fall.
For the past few months, I have been working on creating finding aids for our collections, and am very proud to present them now. This is the first time in the 30 years of the Visual AIDS archive that comprehensive finding aids have been created and we are so excited to make our collections easier to access for the benefit of our researchers, community, and artist members.
A finding aid is a document containing detailed information about a specific collection in an archive. They allow for collections to be more accessible and discoverable to a wider audience. We have recently produced finding aids for two of our collections: the Artist Files and our Institutional Records.
The Visual AIDS Artist Files collection consists of personal papers and records pertaining to the lives and work of artists living with HIV and AIDS, as well as those who have passed. The Visual AIDS Archive (formerly the Archive Project) has been collecting materials since 1994, originally starting as a response to losing not only friends in the AIDS crisis but also the loss of art and personal papers that often followed. Our recently arranged Institutional Records collection consists of materials relating to the organizational history of Visual AIDS from 1989 to 2024.
Both finding aids are fully searchable and easy to navigate with links straight from the table of contents to each entry and back. They both contain information not only about the physical materials held in our collection but also more contextual information. Our Artist Files finding aid has biographical information about each of the 413 artists included and a link to their Artist+ Registry if they have one, so researchers can have a quick and easy way to look at their art and get a little bit more information about them. Our Institutional Records finding aid has similar background information about the various Visual AIDS programs and projects whose materials are included in the collection.
Our finding aids are accessible in two different places on our website and are included in two larger archival finding aid databases, EmpireADC and ArchiveGrid. Both of these databases compile finding aids from various institutions and makes them searchable from one place, which allows researchers to find our collections even if they were not previously aware of them. Because of this, the Visual AIDS Archive will become much more accessible and widely available to researchers, students, curators, artists, and anyone else interested in our materials.
