Decades of Documents: A Community’s Responsibility to the Archive

This article is published in issue 40.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue

The opening of the first issue of the PAVED newsletter, published in spring 2002, announces the creation of PAVED Arts artist-run centre with the merger of Video Vérité (VV, established in 1989) and The Photographers Gallery (TPG, established in 1973). 2023 marks both the 20^th anniversary of PAVED and the 50^th anniversary of TPG. Milestone anniversaries often arrive with an impulse to reflect on the past. PAVED, VV, and TPG have been at the centre of the media arts community in Saskatoon for five decades, and their archival collections speak not only to the history of the organizations but also of the individual artists connected to them, of the city, and of the arts community in Western Canada. 

My interest in artist-run centre (ARC) archives began when I was a library and information science graduate student at the University of Alberta. I had just completed a BFA and was curious about where curators and researchers were accessing information about local contemporary art and artists. In 2015, for my thesis project, I interviewed directors at nine ARCs in Saskatchewan and Alberta about their archives, and I was fascinated by the work being done in this community. The materials they collect are unique and unavailable from other sources. As a collection, they represent local communities and histories that otherwise go undocumented. With few exceptions, ARC archives are underused and often invisible to researchers outside the centre. The question of how to appropriately preserve and make these collections accessible in a way that serves the artist-run community informs my research as a librarian at the University of Saskatchewan, where I continue to work with the PAVED community and their archive.

There is no typical model for ARC archives, and reconciling how communities do archival work with what I know about institutional practices has been a way for me to question how information science theory does (and does not) support this work in the real world. In the past thirty years the meaning of the word ‘archive’ has expanded to include a wide variety of concepts. The connection between contemporary art and archives also has its own history that informs the ways ARCs understand and use archives. ARCs tend to approach their archival work in ways that reflect the culture of these centres, developing alternative practices outside of institutional standards. In this way, community archives theory can give us a lens to understand the challenges ARCs experience in pursuing this work. 

ARCs embody a “community centre” model that is both directed by and responsive to its members. In places where ARCs are routinely impacted by gentrification and shifting funding models, it is the people in the community that hold the collective memory of the organization and the work done to build them. When I look at the PAVED archive, it is filled with documentation of exhibitions, events, workshops, visiting artists, community programs, publications, and traces of the work of many individuals over the years that kept the centre alive and thriving. The highly networked nature of ARCs is also made visible in these records that include collaborations with AKA, Tribe Inc., and other partners. 

Community archives are created and maintained in many diverse contexts, but they are defined by collections that are built by members of a community who also retain some level of control over them. Control is a significant aspect of community archives because they play an important role for historically marginalized groups. These archives tend to grow where communities are invested in documenting, preserving, and sharing their history in their own words. The process of accumulating, arranging, and describing the collections tells the story of the communities that formed and sustained these ARCs. While artist-run communities have often overlapped with historically marginalized communities or artists working in marginalized practices, and their archives can include unique holdings because of this, archival absences are also important in order to understand who was excluded from ARC spaces. Omissions in the archival record are glaringly apparent when viewed in retrospect, and absences are as revealing as the materials it includes.

In many ways, the fact that PAVED and so many other ARCs have maintained archival collections is surprising. Most centres operate under a mandate to support experimental work and artists with a focus on the new. They typically do not have a formal responsibility to maintain and provide access to an ever-growing collection of physical and digital materials. Alex Rogalski was the director at PAVED when I first interviewed him in 2015. We talked at length about the challenges PAVED was facing dealing with a collection of cardboard boxes of papers, slides, tapes, discs, and hard drives that had been saved but never catalogued. The born-digital materials from recent years are largely invisible but constantly growing and at risk of degradation and loss too. We also talked about the collection’s wealth of information about VV, TPG, PAVED, and their work. Like most of the other ARC directors I interviewed that year, I noted an underlying anxiety about doing the archive “correctly” while recognizing the growing need to do something with all this stuff before it became truly unmanageable. 

Alex articulated a common tension in ARCs between the desire and feeling of responsibility to maintain an archive and the reality that this work is often at odds with their mandate and resources. That conversation led to an ongoing project to develop an archival project with PAVED that works within its operating constraints. My involvement with PAVED is not the first archival project the community has undertaken. Their collection includes records from these past projects, and the efforts of previous staff, volunteers, and board members have been invaluable in mapping the history of TPG, VV, and PAVED and in continuing this work.

PAVED Arts History

It is impossible to offer a comprehensive history of PAVED without also talking about the interconnected artist-run communities and organizations that formed them. TPG, VV, and PAVED are a part of the story of the larger arts community in the prairies and these overlapping narratives highlight the importance of preserving a record of these organizations and their communities. TPG played a pivotal role in establishing a vibrant photographic arts scene in Saskatchewan and Canada, providing production facilities and exhibition space, developing a collection, and creating this publication, BlackFlash. 

In the early 2000s, the merger of these two centres was precedent-setting. Many of the film and video collectives in Canada had spun off from established ARCs and were developing their own practices. This had originally been the case for VV, which began as a screening program collaboration between TPG and AKA called Playback Cabaret, later becoming The People’s Video Centre in 1989 before formally establishing as Video Vérité in 1991. Its focus was supporting video producers by providing technical workshops and access to equipment, as well as screening events and opportunities to connect with visiting artists. 

The director of TPG at the time of the amalgamation, Donna Jones, was interviewed in 2002 in the first issue of the PAVED newsletter and described the creation of PAVED as a mutually beneficial merger of two communities. Combining their energy and numbers to expand their influence was a motivating force, along with addressing needs of the arts community. TPG had achieved many of the goals it had set in the 1970s (photography was now widely recognized as a valid artistic medium), and media arts and photography were drawing closer together in production technology requirements. The centres already shared members and had many of the same goals, and so they hoped to offer better production facilities and programming by forming a larger organization. After two years of planning, PAVED Arts officially came into existence on March 31, 2003. 

Exploring the PAVED archives, I find it notable how past archival projects (both attempts at organizing and using the materials) align with significant events in the history of the community. The process of the merger is well documented in the PAVED archive, as you might expect of a process that required board members and staff from both organizations, community and artist representatives, and a mergers officer to work together on a process to create a new governance policy and job descriptions, hire new staff, and create a five-year strategic plan. At the same time this organizational process was underway, a major digital archiving project was initiated to document the work of TPG and VV under the new banner of PAVED Arts. 

The Upstream Archive project created an impressive but short-lived web project that included a searchable database of the digitized TPG photography collection and short clips and descriptions of the VV video collection with full-length digitized videos, available by contacting PAVED. This project was a collaboration between members of TPG and VV and was funded by a Department of Canadian Heritage “Canadian Culture Online” program grant that linked the collection to the (now decommissioned) Virtual Museum of Canada. This was an ambitious project that digitized over 3,500 hours of video from over a decade of work produced at VV and photographs from the permanent collection of nearly 1,000 pieces TPG had built through purchases and donations. When it was established in 1977, the TPG photography collection was one of the few contemporary Canadian photography collections in the country and, by purchasing prints from artists, was influential in establishing a market for art photography. The collection was donated in 2011 to the Mendel Art Gallery (now Remai Modern) where it continues to be an important resource for curators and researchers. 

The Upstream Archive suffered from a problem common to ARC archive projects. It was initiated using one-time grant funding that made it possible to do the extensive digitization work and set up the website, but not to maintain the project over the long term. In the end, the Upstream Archive was only online from 2003 to 2007. While short-lived as a publicly accessible resource, copies of the digitized videos were stored on hard drives at PAVED, and we have been able to remediate these files and will be able to include these works in a new digital archive project. 

As the coordinating work to merge TPG and VV and bring PAVED to life was progressing, the Saskatoon arts community was faced with a serious challenge. Many of the arts organizations, including TPG, AKA, VV, Tribe Inc., and BlackFlash, were located in the Fairbanks-Morse Warehouse and had informally united as the Saskatoon Warehouse Artspace in 1999. Having all these independent arts organizations under the same roof had proved fertile ground for collaborating, sharing resources, and building community. The warehouse was the epicenter of artist-run culture in Saskatoon, but the same year PAVED was established, the building was sold to condo developers, the Saskatoon Warehouse Artspace was dismantled, and everyone had to find a new home. 

Many ARCs across the country were losing their spaces during this time, as gentrification pushed non-profit organizations like PAVED out of previously affordable, central locations. Carrie Gates was the PAVED board president during this time and described 2004-2005 as the “dark ages” of the centre, when they were under tremendous pressure and facing the real possibility of folding. Navigating the sale of the building, the merger process, new governance plans, fundraising, purchasing, and renovating a new space all came with serious financial and community risks. Gates recalled that there were community members who were mad that PAVED would not stay downtown, but the board felt it wasn’t a wise long-term option to rent, and they were being priced out of the area. 

Despite the significant challenges and risks, the board decided to collaborate with AKA artist-run centre and relocate together to a permanent space they would own and could grow into. With the support of the Saskatchewan Arts Board, Saskatoon Community Foundation, and Affinity Credit Union, they purchased 424 20^th St. in the Riversdale neighbourhood, a two-storey building that had previously been Toon’s Kitchen. Members and volunteers helped to renovate the building and turn it into gallery and production spaces. PAVED and AKA reopened in this new, permanent location in November 2005. 

This move was a major milestone in creating stability for PAVED, but the space did not solve the problem of managing the many boxes of records that had been relocated into rented storage lockers during the merger and move. When I interviewed Alex in 2015, they had recently moved the boxes out of storage where they had sustained minor water damage. They contained unique and important documents from the history of PAVED, TPG, and VV, but also water-damaged receipt books, dozens of copies of the same exhibit flyers, and much more. The process of going through each box to determine what should be kept, what was damaged, and what wasn’t needed was time-consuming. They had a talented intern who went through each box, organizing and noting what it contained. This process differed from traditional accession practices for archives, but it worked with the resources of the organization, moved the collection to a safer location, and resulted in a searchable spreadsheet of the box contents. 

Space to store an archive was an issue that came up again and again in my early research with ARC directors on the prairies. The tenuous nature of rented buildings and the space needed to store the materials in an accessible way is a real challenge. Many ARCs I interviewed had to make the same choices PAVED did, putting their collections into storage. One dramatic example was Stride Gallery whose archive, stored in the basement of their building, was significantly damaged by Calgary’s major flood in 2013. When I spoke with their director in 2015, they were hiring a flood recovery coordinator to begin digitizing the most important parts of the collection that had been preserved. 

Digitization is a useful way to deal with physical materials, particularly film and video on fragile and obsolete formats, but it isn’t a complete solution to the archiving problem. PAVED has explored two digital archival projects that largely focused on preserving their video collection. A database archive was started in 2012 with project funding, but like so many short-term funded initiatives, it was not a sustainable model. This project did create a useful process for digitizing and managing video tapes in multiple formats as well as born-digital materials. Once again, I am indebted to the community members and interns who were involved in this project and who helped me locate and remediate these files. 

While PAVED has not maintained an easily accessible archive of primary documents relating to their events and exhibitions, they have been surfacing materials in their closed archives by publishing the PAVED Meant anthology series. Currently in its fourth volume, the publications include critical essays that respond to exhibitions and events that PAVED has produced, creating new interpretative work from their history. In some ways, this publishing project connects back to the early days of ARC archives where publications and print material exchanged through the mail were a major part of ARC culture. 

In his foundational text about the formation of Canadian artist-run centres, AA Bronson describes the publications these artist-run communities produced as a “connective tissue” that made a Canadian arts scene tangible. He notes that arts publications founded in the 1970s were responding to the deluge of materials being created and shared through the mail across the parallel gallery system. From the beginning, ARCs have been documenting their own histories, sharing and saving these materials within their own communities. In my earlier research I found that it was common for ARCs to have collections of publications and promotional materials from other centres and to have mailing lists for peer organizations they have been exchanging materials with for years. Professional publications, like the PAVED Meant series, have been the only relatively widely accessible records of ARC history and culture outside of ARC archives themselves. This anthology series is an example of how PAVED has valued and used their archive to keep their past work visible and in conversation with the community.

At every stage of my work with the PAVED archive, I have been graced by the community’s openness to share their knowledge, skills, and labour to collaborate on this work. In January 2017, Alex Rogalski and I organized an event that invited past board members into the PAVED space to talk about the history of the organization, the future of their archive, and what this work means to the community. We planned the event to coincide with Tim Dallet’s exhibit Relationships between two or more spaces, audience and performer, modified that reflected on his experience working at PAVED a decade earlier. We recorded short interviews in a video confession booth, set up a poster timeline of PAVED’s history along one wall of the gallery, and invited everyone to add their narratives and memories. This collaborative piecing together of the events and people that mark the passage of time revealed anecdotes about notable moments and how people perceived and felt about them.  

We also asked everyone in attendance to describe what they would want to find in a PAVED archive, how they would use the collection, and what its purpose should be. Members saw the collection as being important for posterity and the integrity of the centre. Having a record of how PAVED has become a stable, successful organization validates the work of the artists, cultural workers, and community members who made it happen. The highly networked nature of arts communities means that this archive also has a role to play in documenting the history of connected ARCs and arts communities and the development of media arts in Saskatoon. 

Answers to the question about what should be in the archive revealed information about past projects that helped me to locate and remediate previously digitized work and to understand what information has been important to preserve in earlier efforts. Uncovering the traces of the Upstream Archive from 2003 and the database project from 2014, learning about the DVD records from the production studio (2007 through 2011) and the interest in collecting all the billboard projects together gave us several directions to pursue. I also think about the value of making legible the organizational changes PAVED has weathered and how useful this information could be for groups in similar circumstances. The experience of the amalgamation of the two founding ARCs, purchasing and renovating a building as a non-profit arts collaborative, the solar panel project begun in 2017: these are all independent from the centre’s programming work, but they are essential elements of the history of the PAVED community and could be invaluable information for others. 

Interest in resurrecting past digital works for a new audience; using the collection to inspire new work, critical writing and research; and providing a starting point to reference, re-appropriate, and remix PAVED’s history came up again and again during the 2017 event. This did not surprise me; it is an approach that ARCs with well-established and resourced archives have successfully pursued in other places. Perhaps the most notable example is grunt gallery in Vancouver, founded by Glenn Alteen, who has been an advocate for ARC archives throughout his career. Alteen and grunt archives manager Dan Pon have heavily invested in making their archive accessible. Their 2011 Activating the Archive project consisted of six websites developed from the grunt archives and focused on new presentations, interpretations, and production to show how past work can remain in conversation with and inform new practices. It is not a historical or nostalgic project, but a way to keep the work grunt supported visible and alive. The community-focused nature of ARCs allowed grunt to connect artists and curators involved with the original works with newer curators and creators, fostering conversations within, rather than about, these communities. 

grunt gallery was also instrumental in organizing Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week in collaboration with other ARCs and arts organizations in Vancouver. The work being done in the Vancouver ARC community is the result of many years of investment, seeking out projects and continuing funding, hiring dedicated staff, and collaborating with volunteers, interns, and institutional partners. This model has been an inspiration to me and clearly demonstrates the value of community engagement and collaboration in making this work not only possible but wildly successful. 

The PAVED archive project is ongoing and has progressed in fits and starts over the past eight years. Currently, we are working on a digital archive, in collaboration with the Digital Research Centre at the University of Saskatchewan Library, that will allow anyone to explore materials in the PAVED collection in a way that is sustainable and useful for the PAVED community. The first twenty years of PAVED’s history have included important and impactful work that has laid the foundation for the next twenty years and beyond. It is my hope that, as we open the contents of this archive to new audiences, it will be used by artists, curators, and scholars, and that their work will continue to illuminate the impact PAVED and its predecessors have had on the media arts landscape in Saskatchewan.   

Shannon Lucky (she/they) is an Associate Librarian and researcher at the University of Saskatchewan on Treaty 6 Territory. Her research focuses on how communities can use technology to support their information-based work, particularly in the context of community archives and artist-run culture.

1. Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (2004): 3–22, https://doi.org/10.1162.
2. Glenn Alteen, “Activating Archives,” In Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada, edited by Deanna Bowen (Toronto: Media Arts Network of Ontario, 2019), https://www.otherplaces.mano-ramo.ca/glenn-alteen-activating-archives/.
3. Craig Leonard quoted in: Nicholas Brown and Jaclyn Bruneau, “Are Artist-Run Centres Still Relevant? Part One,” Canadian Art, September 16, 2015, http://canadianart.ca/features/are-artist-run-centres-still-relevant/.
4. Mary Stevens, Andrew Flinn, and Elizabeth Shepherd, “New Frameworks for Community Engagement in the Archive Sector: From Handing over to Handing On,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 16, no. 1–2 (January 1, 2010): 59–76, https://doi.org/10.1080/13527250903441770.
5. Stevens, Flinn, and Shepherd, “New Frameworks,” p 60.
6. Alteen, “Activating Archives.”
7. PAVED Arts “Publications” PAVED Arts, accessed March 8, 2023, https://www.pavedarts.ca/category/publications/.
8. A. A. Bronson, “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat: Artist-Run Centres as Museums by Artists,” Museums by Artists, 29–37 (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983).
9. grunt gallery, “Activating the Archive,” accessed October 7, 2015, http://gruntarchives.org/essay-category-drift-lorna-brown.html.

This article is published in issue 40.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue