More than 1,000 hours of video recordings, 6,000 photographs and other archival records of the Cleveland Performance Art Festival (PAF), an innovative event that brought international emerging artists to Cleveland from 1988 through 1999, have been donated to Case Western Reserve University’s Kelvin Smith Library.
The festival’s founder and manager, Thomas Mulready, who carefully maintained the collection over the years, gifted the archives to the library.
“With the technological resources and expertise at CWRU Kelvin Smith Library, the Cleveland Performance Art Festival couldn’t ask for better partners in this challenging task to host, manage and make accessible thousands of hours of video and thousands of photographs of the most important—along with the most obscure—performance artists working at the end of the 20th century,” said Mulready, who owns and operates the Cool Cleveland e-newsletter.
“What I found remarkable is the passionate engagement of the CWRU team with the mission of the Cleveland Performance Art Festival: to educate the public through this powerful, iconoclastic art form,” Mulready said.
With roots in dance, theater and visual art, performance art developed as a fine art form in the 20th century. It solidified as a movement in the art world in the 1960s, and gained recognition by major museums in the ’80s and ’90s.
The PAF hosted more than 100 performance artists each year, including the well-known Blue Man Group.
“The PAF archives are particularly significant because they document the moment in performance art history that it was becoming recognized as an important form of fine art,” said Melissa Hubbard, head of Special Collections and Archives at Kelvin Smith Library. “One of the most exciting elements of this collection is that nearly all of the performances were recorded on video, and the artists have allowed the video content to be distributed.”
This aspect of the collection will enable the library to embark on a major digitization project that, upon completion, will allow users around the world to view the videos freely online. Subsequently, the collection will serve as one of the best online resources for the study of performance art.
Beyond video content, the collection consists of artist files, photographs and marketing materials from the festival. All components of the PAF collection are accessible to the public at Kelvin Smith Library by appointment. For more information or to schedule a viewing, contact the library’s Special Collections and Archives department at kslspecialcollections@case.edu.