Abigail Sebaly presents a talk titled “From Performance to Archive: Exploring the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Collection at the Walker Art Center.”  Sebaly currently works as the Cunningham Research Fellow at the Walker Art Center. Walker Art Center’s collection of the Merce Cunnigham Dance Company’s complete archive holds over 3500 objects. Extensively researched, it has been used to curate exhibitions based on the richness of its material. This talk will serve as an opportunity to enhance the public’s interest and understanding of archiving and collecting performance.

At a time when museums have a growing interest in presenting and collecting performance, the dialogue often centers on the ephemeral, immaterial nature of the work. But equally vital to consider are the objects that endure—the costumes, sets, and other design elements. My work at the Walker Art Center has been concentrated on the more tangible footprints and traces of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In 2011, the Walker acquired the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s complete archive of sets and costumes, comprising over 60 years of materials and over 3500 objects ranging from larger scale items such as backdrops and set elements to smaller costume pieces, as well as posters, design sketches, and a selection of photographs. The collection is astonishingly varied, including numerous designs by key collaborators such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, to single works by Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Ernesto Neto, Rei Kawakubo, among many others. This presentation will provide a firsthand overview of this unprecedented acquisition, while also addressing some of the curatorial and pragmatic challenges that it poses.

* Abigail Sebaly is currently the Cunningham Research Fellow at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Since July 2011, she has been cataloguing and researching the Walker’s acquisition of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s sets and costumes, which includes over 3500 objects. In addition to visiting archives and conducting over 50 oral history interviews throughout the United States, Sweden, France, and Japan, she has also worked with Walker curators to produce 3 exhibitions on Cunningham’s collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg, Ernesto Neto, and Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo. Prior to this, she served as the director of special projects and administrative assistant to Merce Cunningham at the Cunningham Dance Foundation in New York. She was also a U.S. Department of State Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar in Melbourne, Australia, where she focused on the practice of performance curation with Kristy Edmunds at the Melbourne International Arts Festival. She holds a BFA in Dance and a BA in English from the University of Michigan, and an MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, where she wrote her thesis on comparative practices of performance curation. She is also a 2013 graduate of Wesleyan University’s Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) and continues to serve as the program’s alumni coordinator. She has recently been awarded a Library Research Grant from the Getty Research Institute to begin an independent project on the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in the 1960s.