Julia Weist has been in residence with the Department of Records and Information Services as part of Public Artists in Residence (PAIR), a municipal residency program that embeds artists in city government. Since pursuing a master’s degree in Library Science, New York-based artist Julia Weist’s artistic practice has centered around archives, collections and information resources. Her work has recently been exhibited at the Shed (New York City), the Queens Museum (New York City), the Hong-Gah Museum (Taipei), Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam) and Rhizome, the New Museum (New York City).

On January 15, 1985 Bess Myerson (then the Commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs) sent a memo to Norman Steisel (then Commissioner of the Department of Sanitation) about a program that would install official Artists in Residence within various agencies of New York City government. This initiative was inspired by the great success of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who by her own design had convinced the Department of Sanitation to name her as Artist in Residence in 1977. Myerson’s memo—which can be found at the Municipal Archives within the Department of Cultural Affairs collection—states that the Commissioner felt that 1985 was the right time to “push ahead on this idea… to enlist the support necessary to get this project off the ground.” In reality it took New York City government an additional 30 years to begin the program which launched in earnest in 2015. I was selected as the first Public Artist in Residence (PAIR) within the Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS) in 2019.

The contemporary PAIR program is in many ways modeled on the pioneering work of Laderman Ukeles (who is still in residence, more than forty years later). The projects she has initiated at Sanitation are remarkable for several reasons, including the fact that she was embedded into the agency a full decade before there was a single female sanitation worker on the force. Her projects built previously unimaginable bridges around perceptions of the “san men” who maintained the city. One such effort, “Touch Sanitation” (1979–1980), involved shaking hands with every one of the 8,500 DOS workers who would accept the gesture while thanking them for “keeping the city alive.”

Since the PAIR program was launched there have been 13 artists and collectives invited into various agencies including Department for Veterans’ Services, Department of Corrections, Department for the Aging and others. The fundamental belief behind all of these placements, as articulated by the Department of Cultural Affairs, is that artists are creative problem-solvers who approach issues and processes differently than other groups and communities. This tenet has inspired much of my PAIR work at DORIS during the last year. In that time, I’ve conducted extensive research on the interaction between city government and New York City artists finding fascinating evidence of a complicated relationship stretching back centuries.

The earliest record I encountered relevant for my research was from the Administrative Minutes of New Amsterdam, Vol. 2 (1663). These court minutes document a resident’s petition that the creation of a portrait commission should satisfy the financial obligation of the burgherright, an early form of city citizenship.

As fascinating as the Archives’ very early records are, I found myself drawn to material from the decades between 1930–1990. I noticed that materials documenting artist-government relations clustered around a few key themes. Repeatedly I encountered attempts to define the words “artist” and “artwork” along with more nuanced terms and phrases such as “aspiring artist” and “commercial artist.” Expanding outward from these base-level definitions I found a myriad of papers attempting to articulate the role that artists play in civic life. Many agencies, especially the Health and Hospitals Corporation (which runs the city’s public hospitals), have tried to articulate a clear set of rules for what art should and shouldn’t be present in various public spaces. I’m fascinated by these lists of rules and the reasons behind them, such as a restriction on “abstract imagery too referential to biological forms. We find that such work, although legitimate, does not appeal to hospital clients.” This limitation was among similar rules such as “Themes should be tasteful, no nudes.”

Each of these content areas—definitions, the role of the artist, rules for public art—have become a composition within my project. Other works in the series focus on surveillance of artists by various agencies, government rubrics for evaluating the quality of artworks and even the role that public statuary and monuments in New York City parks played in international diplomacy after the World Wars.

Those interested in seeing the series of artworks that have resulted from my research won’t be able to experience them as traditional public works such as outdoor sculptures or murals throughout the city—although some PAIR residencies result in those outcomes. Instead, I’ve focused on the idea that the records stewarded by DORIS are a form of public space and I’ve decided to “install” my artwork among these materials.

At the federal, state and local level protocols exist that regulate which government records must be kept and made available to the public in perpetuity. The most well-known contemporary example of these regulations in action was the focus on Hillary Clinton’s missing email in the 2016 presidential election. I’ve explored the City’s protocols and, over the course of my residency, have leveraged them to ensure that the artwork I was making would become official government records subject to retention. As a result, my artwork series, entitled Public Record, can be experienced in two ways. First, the public may request to view the compositions through a Freedom of Information Law request on NYC’s Open Records Portal. Typically, this platform is used by journalist, advocates, activists, lawyers and other engaged citizens for transparency into the work of government. In the case of my project, it will be used as an exhibition space. The second way the compositions will be brought into the public realm is through their eventual move into the collection of the Municipal Archives. Every record has a retention period, during which it’s safeguarded by the agency where it originated. The retention period on my artworks will expire one year after the end of service term of the current Commissioner of DORIS, Pauline Toole. After that they will be processed, accessioned and made available to the public through the Municipal Archives. This spring a campaign will be posted on LinkNYC kiosks to announce the project and to explain these two forms of access.

One of the greatest challenges of my residency was the sheer amount of material that the government makes and preserves. During my nine months I reviewed 215 cubic feet of paper in the Archives and yet this accounts for less than 1/10 of 1% of the collection. In order to research the entire collection the length of my residency would need to increase to 1,000 years, assuming the government made no new records in that millennium. We create, we keep and we look. Here’s hoping that cycle persists for the next few centuries in New York City.