Matchmaking in the Archive

19 Conversations with the Dead and 3 Encounters with Ghosts

by

English language

Published Jan. 3, 2023 by Rutgers University Press.

ISBN:
978-1-9788-2317-4
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4 stars (1 review)

Though today’s LGBTQ people owe a lot to the generations who came before them, their historical inheritances are not always obvious.

Working with the archives of the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical Society, artist E.G. Crichton decided to do something to bridge this generation gap. She selected 19 innovative LGBTQ artists, writers, and musicians, then paired each of them with a deceased person whose personal artifacts are part of the archive.

Including 25 pages of vivid images, Matchmaking in the Archive documents this monumental creative project and adds essays by Jonathan Katz, Michelle Tea, and Chris Vargas, who describe their own unique encounters with the ghosts of LGBTQ history. Together, they make the archive come alive in remarkably intimate ways.

4 editions

reviewed Matchmaking in the Archive by E. G. Crichton

good intent, mixed execution

4 stars

An odd book that explores an evolving art piece in which the author matched other artists with people whose lives had been included in the archives of an LGBTQ society. The idea for the piece—matchmaking and creating queer lineages—is great. But the book focuses relentlessly on the author’s experiences of creating the project rather than the artists’ experiences of making the art, or even conveying those installations so that the reader can experience them. The third part with invited essays from Katz, Tea, and Vargas was great—smart and beautifully written. If you’re a GLAMs person, this can open up lots of thoughts both about how we as researchers and we as institutional workers could create opportunities for public and creative work with our collections.

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