The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage’s project grants seek to bolster organizations’ capacity for discovery, collaboration, and interpretive distinction. Presenting archive-based exhibitions and retrospectives requires time for in-depth research and strong networks of experts in various fields.

Two Center-supported exhibitions—one on an experimental Mexican photographer and another on a group of mid-20th Century Japanese filmmakers and multimedia artists—have been produced through extensive international collaboration, research trips, and interviews with artists and their collaborators and family members.

We spoke with artistic leaders from the Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College and Collaborative Cataloguing Japan, which partnered with Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia on their exhibition, to learn more about their research processes and what their investigative work uncovered.

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Berman Museum of Art

Enrique Bostelmann: Apertures and Borderscapes

On view through December 15, 2024, Apertures and Borderscapes is a multifaceted retrospective on Mexican photographer Enrique Bostelmann (1939–2003), showcasing his genre-bending work along with new interviews with his family, collaborators, and art historians. The exhibition examines how Bostelmann’s photographs consider and transgress boundaries across cultures, genres, and countries.

Deborah Barkun, Berman Museum of Art creative director, traveled to Mexico twice on research trips for this project. There, she spent time in Bostelmann’s home studio, poring over racks of prints and stacks of portfolios—more than 10,000 photos—in situ with works the photographer collected from his contemporaries and other ephemera to contextualize his four decades of work. 

Even more valuable than the setting, though, were the guides who helped fill in the back story from their collective memory, like Bostelmann’s daughter Saskia, an artist herself, and his Santa Fe gallerist Sandra Jo Martinez. “Every photograph had this set of stories that went along with it, and so I would just flip through all day long and hear all of these stories,” Barkun said. 

She spent a lot of time with Bostelmann’s widow, Yeyette, a frequent collaborator with her husband who typically drove the car while he took photos from the passenger seat on their many cross-country trips through Central and South America. Yeyette offered details about Bostelmann’s process and techniques, sharing for example how, despite eyesight diminished by his albinism, he’d point somewhere from the car to say, “There’s a photo over there.” The couple would wait there, sometimes for hours, until the quality of light shifted just to where he wanted it to be. 

“My mother was blind from birth, so I’m really interested in that idea of how the visual and verbal translate back and forth,” Barkun said. “The photographs themselves are so composed and formally rich. He envisioned and was able to see [what he wasn’t able to perceive].”

Research trips can be a risk: You don’t fully know what you’ll uncover and learn. But it’s the sort of discovery and development work the Center believes in supporting. “I haven't had this kind of opportunity to have such a sustained relationship with a project, to be able to travel and spend weeks and weeks in the archive, but also sort of inhabit the spaces that Enrique was inhabiting, tracking down his old homes and studios, having access to these experts,” Barkun said. “It was such a tremendously valuable experience that I think has been unmatched in my professional life. My understanding of the project has really grown over time. The grant made possible this sustained focus and concentration and the sense that there was no liability in just looking for three weeks.”

Throughout his career, Bostelmann shot photographs for commercial projects as well as his artistic practice, typically carrying three different cameras with him at any given time so he could shoot the same subjects in different styles. The nature of this project afforded Barkun the time to explore the porousness that Bostelmann saw between genres of photography. “He always considered his commercial work as an opportunity to make fine art as well,” Barkun said. “He would be shooting with one camera for an advertising campaign, and then he would pick up another camera and shoot—differently or not differently, but always thinking about this idea of the fluidity and the seamlessness of the medium.”

Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia

Community of Images: Japanese Media Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s

For Community of Images, an exhibition running through August 9 at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Japan America Society partnered with Collaborative Cataloguing Japan (CCJ) to preserve and reexamine the contributions and influence of Japanese artists working in the US in the mid-20th century.

Central to the project has been collaboration with artists to reinstall some of their historic works. “Having intimate relationships with the artists is very important,” Ann Adachi-Tasch, Community of Images co-curator and CCJ executive director, said. “The trust-building is a huge thing, and there are so many artists in the roster, so it's a huge challenge to make sure that everybody is getting what they need from their project.”

One piece being revisited is Ko Nakajima’s Liquid Projector, a rotating projector wrapped in a skirt of magnifying glasses to refract its projections around the room. While some photographs exist of the original 1969 work, neither Nakajima nor anyone else has the original sketches or plans. To install the piece in Philadelphia has required trans-Pacific cooperation: Nakajima worked with artists he trusts in Japan to sketch out the plans from his memory, and then an artist and video production company in Philadelphia fine-tuned the designs and fabricated the structure.

Co-curator Go Hirasawa has been responsible for digitizing a 1970 film piece by Seiichi Fujii, Body Wave. The original work is a two-channel film projection with sound. Digitizing it has taken research and discussion, including close coordination with the artist. “We obviously had to speak to the filmmaker about the piece, how it was made, how it was presented,” Adachi-Tasch said. “We found the sound element in a different collection. To place the sound in the digitization, we had to be careful about syncing it. We're digitizing, but we’re essentially recreating how it was presented then.”

A project like this one involves collaborating with archivists and labs with specialized skills, a task made easier by CCJ’s existing network. Often, researchers don’t know what materials are available until they start digging, and only then do they learn their condition. Sometimes the artifact is molding or stricken with “vinegar syndrome,” a chemical deterioration of the film, making restoration an urgent matter. Sometimes the work is in a format that requires obscure equipment to play. 

Archival projects can also require time-consuming detective work. The Community of Images iteration of filmmaker Takahiko Iimura’s Shelter 9999 is one such case. CCJ had worked with NYU’s Media Preservation program on a 2016 survey of Iimura’s studio. Sometime after, the film went missing, and Iimura died in 2022. Through some collaborative investigation, the team traced the original 16-millimeter film back to a box of items Iimura had sent from New York to Tokyo, which had ended up at his wife’s brother’s house (and also contained instructions for performing the piece). 

The original project was a collaboration between Iimura and composer Alvin Lucier, so the team looked into the Lucier archive at the New York Public Library. There, they found a film collection that was used in an iteration of Shelter 9999, which they’ve since digitized. They also found slides for the original piece at Iimura’s studio. 

“And now, we are presenting a 2024 version of Shelter 9999,” Adachi-Tasch said. The Community of Images team is exhibiting a three-screen presentation of the work, featuring the 16-millimeter film, slides, and shorter film pieces. “It was a performance, so it was never presented as an installation. It's going to be an interpretation, but we're very much excited that we were able to pull these different elements together.”