"Matchmaking in the Archive draws the reader into intimate paired relationships between the living and the dead. Each pair was formed through a unique matchmaking process that took place in the archives of The Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical Society. The author, who is also the matchmaker, issued an invitation to wander through one archive, to connect with one person, and to invent a creative response. The nineteen relationships that emerged generated a powerful body of creative work that has been exhibited and performed on four continents. It has encompassed live monologue, poetry, an aria sung by a male soprano, sculptural installations, paintings, photography, personal letters, a jam session, a short film, and the author's uncanny photographic portraits of each matched pair. Underlying the creative work are questions that crop up repeatedly: What is our lineage? How do we remember individual people after they die? What does a person's archive reveal? And, just as critical, what is absent from the archive, what secrets do the artifacts suggest, what shimmers in the gaps?"--
Though today's LGBTQ people owe a lot to the generations who came before them, their historical inheritances are not always obvious. Working with the archives of the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical Society, artist E.G. Crichton decided to do something to bridge this generation gap. She selected 19 innovative LGBTQ artists, writers, and musicians, then paired each of them with a deceased person whose personal artifacts are part of the archive. Including 25 pages of vivid images, Matchmaking in the Archive documents this monumental creative project and adds essays by Jonathan Katz, Michelle Tea, and Chris Vargas, who describe their own unique encounters with the ghosts of LGBTQ history. Together, they make the archive come alive in remarkably intimate ways
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
