A keynote address for the 2020 Joint Annual Meeting of the Council of State Archivists and the Society of American Archivists.
December 2021 (published)

The follow text is an excerpt from the transcript for a keynote address that was delivered on August 6, 2020 for the 2020 ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2020: Creating Our Future Conference.

As an organization we know that working against decades of omissions and gaps, and attempting to secure access and placement of neglected cultural histories, artists, and storytellers within the coveted arenas of scholarship, academia, and research is key, but it’s a type of change and dismantling that can and will be met with resistance.

We will not rely on chance and hope that architects of history will include the omitted histories that we nurture. We will continue taking a complex approach to change the narrative on several fronts, and make sure the agents of change, a.k.a. the artists, writers, curators, and partners we work with, are equipped with the resources and access they need in order to contribute to and be leaders in that change.

Even with those challenges, I remain grateful because many of you within the archiving community have been early understanders and appreciators of our work.

As I continued to meditate on this theme, and what “Creating Our Future” looks like in practice, I couldn’t help but acknowledge that whether or not we knew it, Sixty was created out of that necessity.

In Chicago, nationally, and globally we are seeing more demands for more equitable, more just, and radically imagined futures. We at Sixty have always been working toward that.

The futures that are being demanded by protestors, grassroots organizers, the Movement for Black Lives, trans and queer activists, disabilitiy activists, and anyone at the margins hold at their core an ethos that is radically and unapologetically honest, restorative, nourishing, collectively created, and transformative. These futures welcome questions about value systems and the histories we’ve been told explicitly through history books and curricula or implicitly through violence, racist systems, and deep, relentless divestment.

Read the full keynote here….

[1] Still of Tempestt Hazel, sitting on the stairs of the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago. From a video filmed by On the Real Film.

[2] Two prints and one large photograph hang on the walls in the sales gallery of the South Side Community Art Center in August 2020. Tempestt Hazel stands at the photograph, pointing out different artists included in the photo “A Great Day in Bronzeville.” Still courtesy of On the Real Film.

[3] Librarians Analú López, Leslie Patterson, and Victoria Sky in the special collections area of the Harold Washington Library, where the Chicago Artist Files are stored. The three of them sit at a table with archive materials covering the table. They are surrounded by bookshelves with books and boxes on the shelves. Photo courtesy of Sixty Inches From Center.

[4] Ten people sit next to one another around a red leather couch within the library room of the Read/Write Library. There are bookshelves surrounding them and they are all smiling while looking directly into the camera. From left to right, top to bottom, we have Tempestt Hazel, H. Melt, Mel Leverich, Aay Preston-Myint, Kate Hadley Toftness, Jennifer Patiño Cervantes, Sara Chapman, Christina Nafziger, Ivan LOZANO, and Catherine Grandgeorge. Photo courtesy of Sixty Inches From Center.

[5] Nine people standing, smiling and laughing together, in a room behind wooden chairs with coats hanging on the back of two of them. Taken during a Sixty Inches From Center editorial meeting at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, 2018. Photo courtesy of Sixty Inches From Center.

[6] Several people gathered on the steps outside of a large residential greystone near the South Loop of Chicago. Image courtesy of Sixty Inches From Center.