Afro Newspaper Archive and Prelinger Archive: Making and Using Archives | Savannah Wood and Rick Prelinger

Evidence Over Story, Assembly Over Algorithm | Rick Prelinger

Follow the Thread, Pull the Thread, Thread the Needle: Patchwork Projects Towards a Funerary Quilt | Savannah Wood

Presentation Description:
Most of the projects we will hear about this semester take place on-site, utilizing features of the landscape. What are other digital spaces and archives that facilitate our ability to tell stories about a particular geography? 

This week, we have two speakers in conversation about their work based in community archives. UC Santa Cruz Professor of Film and and Digital Media Rick Prelinger will join us to present on his Lost Landscapes project, which comes out of the Prelinger film archives. In the Lost Landscapes series, Prelinger has compiled and edited footage from home movies to provide portraits of cities through the lenses of everyday people. Over the last two decades, Prelinger has presented films about San Francisco, Detroit, New York, Los Angeles, and, Oakland.

Artist and cultural organizer Savannah Wood will share her work helping to preserve the archives of the AFRO American Newspapers. Established in 1892, the AFRO is a weekly African-American newspaper published in Baltimore, Maryland and the longest-running African-American family-owned newspaper in the United States. Working closely with the collection, Savannah has created projects such as To The Front: Black Women and the Vote which utilized the archives to bring DC and Maryland’s Black women suffragists into the national suffrage conversation. Savannah will also share her work in progress on a current project related to the founding of the AFRO American Newspaper Archives and the role that land played. 

The speakers will discuss questions around access to documentation, collaboration with communities, and the positionalities of the archivist and presenter. We will think critically about common forms of storytelling seen in commercial media, museums, and other cultural organizations.

Rick Prelinger Biography:
Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer, filmmaker and outsider librarian. In 1982, he founded Prelinger Archives, a collection of industrial, advertising, educational and amateur films that was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. Prelinger has partnered with the Internet Archive (of which he is a board member) to make 2,100 films available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world. Prelinger has recently made several film programs that he categorizes as “historical interventions,” called Lost Landscapes of San Francisco (7 annual parts) and Lost Landscapes of Detroit (3 annual parts). With Megan Prelinger, he is the co-founder of Prelinger Library, an appropriation-friendly private research library open to the public in downtown San Francisco. His archival work currently focuses on collecting, recontextualizing, and exhibiting home movies and amateur films.

Savannah Wood Biography:
Savannah Wood is an artist and cultural organizer with deep roots in Baltimore and Los Angeles. Wood works primarily in photography, text and installation to explore spirituality, domesticity, and identity-formation, often in relation to place. She combines new and old works with found objects and archival documents to create unique, accumulative installations that privilege non-linear notions of time.

Major themes in her work include ancestral research, reframing land as a readable archive of historical activity, and reimagining humans as part of, rather than separate from, the natural world. Her projects reconnect people with the everyday beauty of our world and the histories that lie hidden just below its surface. She approaches this work with curiosity and reverence.

As the Executive Director of Afro Charities, Wood is creating programming and infrastructure to increase access to the 129-year-old Afro-American Newspapers’ extensive archives. Learn more at www.afrocharities.org.You can view Savannah’s projects here.

Learn more about other speakers here

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