The New York Public Library has acquired Brown’s archive, including 1,200 videotapes that provide an invaluable record of her creative process.
After an extensive search for the right home, the company is placing its founder’s archive — including the Building Tapes and corresponding notebooks, known as the Building Notebooks — at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
In September 2020, the New York Public Library’s Performing Arts Division officially acquired the archives of Trisha Brown. As the TBC archives technical consultant, I had the pleasure of collaborating with Cori Olinghouse and later Ben Houtman in designing the database that housed the interrelated information for Brown’s movement and ephemera.
In 2009, near the beginning of her work on the archives, Cori invited me to collaborate on building a database to catalog the materials. Given our mutual histories with the company, covering two different time periods, it felt like a perfect teaming of minds to identify, parse, and clarify the materials, structures, and relationships of the materials. Our work over the next 10 years developed this integrated database that will be shared through the library.
Learn more in the New York Times’ article.