This piece is not intended to benefit from the very tragedy of the event that shocked (to put it lightly) an entire generation of American society. It took a couple of years to approach this piece, questioning its purpose after it was written in 2018. It was written following a tough appraisal period of a project I worked on, which can be viewed at NYU Fales and Special Collections page under “Subseries F. New York Disaster Recovery Program (NDRP)”. In a sense, this piece could be filed under my “Personal Papers.” The practice of reviewing topics in this piece includes questioning intention of survey. This was one I approached the Society of American Archivists for publication, but I chose not to pursue this option due to the fact that it felt off to do so. This is a personal piece that provides no standards or answers. It’s a reflection that questions the appraisal process and how it relates to spillover: how does an archivist separate their work from the experiences of the papers they survey? Perhaps there is no answer. This example is an ongoing conversation that makes for this discipline a challenging one – both intellectually and psychologically.
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The challenge to process loss calls upon the archivist to test their ability to separate the material from the being. While I worked as a project archivist at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), I willingly processed a collection series called the “New York Arts Recovery Fund Grant (NYARF).” The NYARF grant that NYFA provided as a grant opportunity for artists and arts organizations in New York City affected by the events of 9/11 and hoping to rebuild both their lives and artistic foundations. Quite naively, I jumped into this series with the anticipation that cats feel when they are about to be given treats. This experience would allow me to reflect on the many different stories that individuals were willing to tell about NYC in a post-9/11 world. The mistake I made – something that you will make many of as an archivist – was to see the series as an opportunity to gain something. I accept that my curiosity to review over hundreds of applications expressing loss of work, resources, and life was somewhat of a goldmine for me as a researcher. But the challenge goes well beyond absorbing these experiences for a mere anecdote to tell at some overblown cocktail party. To me – this process was extremely personal.
The Recovery Fund consisted of 24 boxes of application work. In the scheme of NYFA’s collection initially measuring 1,000 linear feet, this series occupied a modest portion of the collection in its own unique way. It was a dark corner that could be tough to sit at for a long period of time. Considering the fact that most project archivists spend their days hunched over desks, attempting to meet a quota per week to ensure that the schedule is running smoothly, a quick detour to materials that define a generation of loss is not for the faint of heart. If there was a piece of advice I’d have to give for those working on materials in relation to 9/11 is to take breaks. I did not follow this advice – until I looked to the skyline on clear night and thought about the two towers that occupied lower Manhattan and the people that worked in them. Sometimes the intangible haunts you in the most unexpected ways.
Throughout the process, I slowly but surely lost my ability to separate the loss that hundreds of artists faced from my own life. It became apparent that I was alphabetically arranging the series based on the last names of individuals. From A-Z, this would make for the ideal if a researcher were scanning through a container list to see what individuals or organizations’ missions were affected. Most importantly, it would make for a more effective computer mouse-scroll. For context of the collection’s organization, it was almost objective to take this approach, as normal as breathing in air. But soon I began to arrange the materials, I immediately felt jaded by the organization scheme. And almost randomly, I started to think about people I knew. There were my high school friends in Ketchikan. My writing collective in New York. My middle school classmates friends in Italy. Then there was the one I had lost in Virginia. Another in Bremerton. After reflecting on how they might have been in their lives at that very moment, even I knew that I did not think of them in a categorical way. Moreover, these artists in the series were New Yorkers that were trying to rebuild their lives in a time of loss, and they were fighting for their survival and for their art. To categorize their proposals on an alphabetical level seemed too standard to me – too disingenuous. In retrospect, if I had standard control, I would have left their names in their original order to give a more authentic feel to the entropy that society faced on that day. Much like walking the streets, I wasn’t walking in line with them, but I was bumping arms, shoulders, and elbows with them. Given the nature of these submitted applications, I fell deeper into the conscience of their loss, their panic, their worries, as if I was running from the dust too.
After arranging these boxes in accordance to the nature of the rest of the collection, I was left with a question that will stay with me for the remainder of my career: how does one appraise another’s loss?
As an archivist it becomes a central challenge to choose what materials stay in the collection and what materials are thrown away. There’s no real measure to appraise another’s loss if there’s no real chance of reflecting on what is being processed. At the end of the day, everyone loses something. Some may lose more than others. Following the loss of this “something,” there will always be a different reaction for different people. In the case of the New York Arts Recovery Fund Grant, some stories were lost. Not everyone’s story got to be told. A mission in making these stories accessible and open to the public is the standard that outweighs the arbitrary nature of organizing materials as convenient. Truth be told, these stories of applicants and organizations are not convenient, because they carry the pain many individuals felt on 9/11. Sharing these stories take courage, and it is the archivist that must salvage the story. They must carry the story toward the air so that one day a researcher may stumble upon them and help life breathe through each discovery.
I approached the New York Arts Recovery Fund and events of 9/11 as a loss in national tragedy that affected the country as a collective. And when you talk about 9/11, the indicator of this collective loss usually begins with one question: where were you on that day? I was living in Hawaii. I was 9. I had woken up for school. I remember that I saw my sister and brother. My mother and father were silent. They pointed to the television screen. I thought I was watching a movie. Then I realized that people were in those towers. I was witnessing many of lose their lives. Following my work on this collection, I can only hope that I did my best to save them.
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