Assignment
The thumbnail grid above shows new photos from one box of vintage t-shirts in the LHA Collection. Photos were taken by interns Sara Hodaie @sarahodaielovesyou and Maddie Provost @maddieeprovosttt. All rights reserved.
I wasn’t entirely sure what my specific job was going to be at the Archives for the summer. I knew I wanted to dive into the zine, book, and art collections but I had also hoped Saskia would throw as much as she could at me so that I could experience different aspects of the Archives. That is pretty much exactly what happened.
Saskia told me she had been working on reorganizing the t-shirt collection ar the Archives for some time and hoped I could help with it. I was thrilled. Vintage gay t-shirts?! YES PLEASE! Anything old and vintage is a love of mine to begin with but to see, feel, stage, and learn about all the t-shirts that have come through the Archives since it started, was a dream come true.
Above you can see box 1 of the t-shirt collection. Fellow interns Sara Hodaie and Maddie Provost photographed. I got to work with them one of the days I was on site. We worked together to stage the t-shirts in the basement of the Archives and got to learn all about each other. It was great getting to know Maddie and Sara. They were a bit younger than me but hearing how they talked, what they talked about intrigued me and I got a glimpse into what it felt like being in a queer GenZ conversation.
What I learned about the queer GenZ generation:
They are happy.
Excited about life.
They want to make a change in this world.
Leave their mark.
Be unapologetically themselves.
And I am totally here for it.
Another part of this t-shirt project that I worked on was recategorizing the t-shirts. This was a big understanding that Saskia had been working on for quite a while. Coming into this work that has already started I got to learn a lot about where the t-shirts have come from, the importance of every single note made about a donation, and how navigating archives, especially online, keeps evolving and we need to evolve with it.
As I mentioned all of the t-shirts have been donated from all over the country and world by different organizations, groups, individuals, and events. We needed to simplify the verbiage in all the different categories and details that come along with each t-shirt. Saskia came up with the wonderful idea that the “Major Category” should be “Communities”. This made perfect sense once she said it out loud and also once we started to brainstorm all the communities that we come across within the t-shirt collection. Below you will find the updated list of communities as well as primary and secondary subjects. The primary and secondary subjects help the researcher further their search with other words related to the collection.
Saskia and I spent a few afternoons going back and forth with each other on what words meant, did it make sense to use those particular words, were they inclusive?
It was also an eye-opening exercise for me as we got to break down the meanings, history and humans that surround words like separatism, protests, marches, feminism, etc. One huge takeaway: Accuracy and verbal brainstorming gets the job done.
This is what our listing looked like towards the end of my internship. I really enjoyed this one-on-one work with Saskia. I really felt I learned a lot from her but that she discovered some things from me as well.
⤹ Three of my favorite t-shirts from Box 1 ⤵
This is a visual example I created for Saskia that showed how the information for each t-shirt could be broken down. The Archives are moving from one online archival program to another and this refresh will be very helpful when it comes to implementing this new system.
