Staff Q&A: Archivist Kristen Muenz

Yeah, it’s wonderful. What an amazing coincidence.

It's been, honestly, an incredible ride.The position I'm at here is very different from a conventional, institutional archive. At a big archive, you have multiple people, all sorts of layers in the organization. You have the people making big policy decisions, and then you have the people who get to actually handle the materials personally. Here, I get to do both, which is honestly the dream for me. I’m diving into stuff that has been saved, but not really organized in a central archival way before—so I get to handle the stuff for the first time, which is always a thrill. And I also get to structure the whole archive from the ground up, too, so I’m empowered to approach things in a very innovative way.

Yeah, it's daunting, but it's also really exciting to me, because my last position was the complete opposite. I was working with an archive that had decades of history, close to a century in places, and the way things had been done and organized all those years was constantly on your shoulder and weighing on you. I joked a lot about getting super mad at people who have been dead for decades.

Starting an archive is daunting, but it’s also incredibly refreshing. It’s like, OK, I can do this thing we need to do, and we can start using the best practices we have in the field now, in 2022. I don't have to tear up any old structure to just start doing that. That blank slate feels awesome.

That's a really good question. I always say that I got into archives kind of by accident, because that's just the way that it shook out for me.

For me, I wound up in library school a couple of years after undergrad. I'd been in finance for a bit and it really wasn't working for me.

Oh yeah. It was a whole thing. I've worked many places, but when I finally went to library school, there was a student archiving position open at the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive. At the time I was just like, I'm a student, I need a job. I didn’t know a lot about archives when I started, but I caught on quickly once I started doing hands-on work. That was really where I discovered that this was the field where I belonged, the work that I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Thanks to the path I started down with that experience, I was able to become a sort of omnivorous archivist.I had that initial, very specialized AV archiving experience that is still super close to my heart. I also went into location-based historical archives for a little bit. During the pandemic, I was involved a lot in community archives because there was a massive layoff at the museum where I landed after grad school, and I wanted to keep doing this work I love and helping people some way. The experience with community archives was incredible, and I wouldn't trade that for anything. Now, I’m working in the arts. My journey really has taken me all across the field, all across different kinds of materials and subject matters. The way I’ve been able to grow and evolve because of that has been wonderful.

Do I use it? Definitely. But the funny part of archives is, that seemingly-unrelated background definitely does not make me unique among my archives colleagues in terms of point of entry into the field. I would say for the majority of people, archival work is a second or third career. 

When I was working in an audiovisual archive, a lot of people I worked with were involved in video production or film - they had that sort of angle that led them into the work we were doing. I feel like with archives, you tend to do something else first and find your way into archives eventually versus setting a straight course for an archival career from the get-go. Finance wasn't even planned for me. I was in English and marketing in undergrad, and finance was where I could get a job  after I graduated. 

It was sort of this winding path, but I use my English major all the time – so much of archival work is writing. I am always one for the usefulness of an English degree. And the business part can be very helpful with taking the passion archivists have for archives and grounding it in real-world constraints, particularly when talking to people outside the field who may be more business-minded.

That need for translation is not really something I've encountered here, though. I really feel like I lucked out so hard. My colleagues here are super supportive; they have a profound understanding of how much work goes into creating an archive, and they understand the value of an archive. I did not have to lay that groundwork coming in. That really was a dream scenario. There definitely are many situations where you as an archivist are not that lucky, and I've been in them before! So business helps in that way. Because of my background, I understand how to talk to people who approach archives as a business endeavor and get them to understand the value in an archive. 

Yes. That is an incredible thing, because that really firm business mindset is a wave that has swept through a lot of archives and library systems over the last decade. And I think, especially in the wake of COVID, I've seen that just wreak havoc on some of my peers’ jobs. Running an archive strictly as a business really is antithetical to the purpose of what an archive is – and beyond that, what it can be. If you choose any one thing as your only metric for the value of a given archive, it’s really going to limit the whole endeavor.

It's so tricky because I think there's the mental aspect of it, and then there’s the physical aspect of it. Physically, there was a room here at the Wex where a lot of archival materials had landed over time. Going through all of it from the very top to the bottom, organizing it into archival boxes, and figuring out what the hell it all was—that was an incredibly satisfying experience. That rocked. Mentally, as unglamorous of an answer as it is, the most satisfying thing was just creating the policies here and doing things from the get-go that are inclusive, and that are really radically changing the idea of not only what an archive is, but what an archive can be.

I agree entirely. With the Wex, since the institution itself does not actively collect (though we do have some holdings, funnily enough), I think it makes the institutional archive is all the more important. Because we’re non-collecting, the story of the Wex unfolds entirely in our institution’s history and memory. The history part of that involves aggregating documentation from all over the center and seeing what has been kept and recorded over time - you can archive the documents associated with an exhibition, like programs and installation photos, and you have records of performances and screenings as well. The memory part is much more fluid, looking to capture people’s experiences or materials outside of the official records that shows parts of our history.

I would say that a lot of that does go back to building a really strong archival framework. You get a sense of this especially when we look at older archives. You get this idea that we’re beholden to the past, and specifically the ways we’ve always approach the past – “the way we’ve always done it.”What I’m going after with the Wex’s archive is the opposite side of that coin, saying, “OK, that’s the way things were done then, but this is now—and from the very start here, we are making sure that the archive is accessible.” That’s a huge professional thing for me. I absolutely want people to know that this resource is here—not just for researchers, but anybody who’s curious. I would really love to expand the scope and reach of archives to include people who have traditionally been shut out of these institutions. The history of this organization is the history of all of these people who have been through here over time—artists, employees at all levels of the organization, and visitors. It’s a really expansive and beautiful picture. I think that the more perspectives you can get as you look at the past, the better and richer view into the past you ultimately have. That's something we're really going after here.

To me, it takes on a couple of different forms. I think that to your point, with the white gloves and this sort of idea that you have to be an academic or historian to get at these records—all that is something that I'm very excited to do away with completely. I think the more that archives throw away that mindset, the better we all are for it. Anyone is welcome to come here, and I want to reach out and engage with people to invite them into these spaces, and to challenge their existing ideas of what is or isn’t “archival.” It's not just the records that an institution produces that are archival; our own stories can be archival. Our own materials that make up this sort of constellation of what a life is—all that can be archival. It's all just about collecting and valuing those stories.

Part of that inclusion is also looking critically at the way that archives have approached certain communities in the past, particularly marginalized communities. That’s something that’s always been important to me. As a queer woman, I know what it’s like to find materials that were taken from our community in the past and were not archived with respect and dignity. That could mean they’re not processed to a degree where they're easily discoverable as queer history, or they’re just sort of shut away, or they’re treated in a sort of medicalized way. Actually, the new exhibition with Carlos Motta is addressing this explicitly in a way that I am super excited to see. But yes—I want to create an archive that, rather than collecting from a given community, continues to engage with and grow and change alongside it.

It sounds easy, since you’re really just doing the right thing, but this evolution in protocols is still radical in the archival field. Stuff like “if someone changes their name or starts going by a different set of pronouns, you should change how you refer to them in your finding aids.” I can’t imagine doing it any other way, but that’s the kind of stuff that’s very new to the field. It takes a little extra time to do this important work, but it is shocking how much of the field over time has been opposed to doing it, even though it makes all the difference in the world to the people in our collections and the people who come to our collections. It's so important to the Wex, too, since vibrant and ongoing relationships with artists are so integral to what we do. We want them to know that we are holding these traces of the time that they shared their work here carefully and with respect, all while paying attention to them as they continue to live their lives and grow and develop.

It totally does.

Oh my God, you’re so right. If I ever sat down and wrote a memoir, I’d love to weave these two topics together. That’s a completely megalomaniac thing to say—"When I'm writing this memoir.” God, no.

My partner and I both grew up in Ohio—childhood friends!—and have lived here more or less our entire lives. I'm glad that the statistic about Columbus being this huge concentration of queer people is making the rounds more and more because it is so important. I really have found the most rewarding experiences with queer people in places that you wouldn't conventionally associate with queerness. Growing up in the late nineties, I always thought, Oh, if you're queer, you go somewhere else, you leave. You go to San Francisco. As an adult, though, I’ve found it's the exact opposite. I’ve found the most validating and transformative experiences with queer people, for me, have been in the Midwest. I have so many queer friends locally. The legislative aspects that are always there – we always fight against them. However, there's also this core of it to me that can't be touched by any of that. It’s like, Yeah, I am here. This is my home too. And I have no intention of leaving it for any reason.

I think that kind of fuels that archival passion about creating space for people to tell their stories. You’re reaching out a hand and saying, "I understand that, looking back at these centuries of archival history, you have ample reason to distrust the entire institution of archives. But we are changing and we are opening these spaces up for everybody.” Actually, according to a recent survey of the archival field that came out just earlier this year, around 22 percent of people working in the archival field identify somewhere in the queer community.

It’s amazing. And it’s also this rising wave of archivists who are, for the most part I believe, under 39. It makes it tremendously exciting to imagine where the field will be even in the next 10, 15 years. Seismic changes are coming, and we’re part of it, this group of people saying, "No, we're here, and we're going to actually influence this archival world because this is how history gets told and made, and it’s time we did this in a way that respects everybody.”

I lived in Columbus for about four years as a kid, and I have this vague, almost sensory memory of going to a performance at Mershon at some point—I want to say it was a ballet performance. It was something that a friend with cool parents took us to. Fast forward decades later, I was on the archival job market, looking around was like, "Oh, the Wex is an institution that I know, and I know really good people in Columbus.” There was definitely a sense of familiarity that helped bring me back here. I thought the Wex would be a really incredible place to look into more now that I’m an adult—and it has been!

That is a good question. There are so many! In particular, I'm still kind of starstruck by some stuff that I saw at the most recent Society of American Archivists conference. There were community archives there that were doing incredible, innovative things. There was a university archive at Brandeis that had a really radically inclusive processing manual, of all things, which is not a document that you typically look to for inclusivity, but they did really beautiful work with it. I think I find something to admire in each of these archives that I encounter in these spaces where people are talking about diverse archives and inclusive archives, regardless of the size or scale of their operation. Wherever we come from, we all bring ourselves and our hearts to this work, and I am so excited for the field we are all creating together.