Stanford University Libraries Digitizes Carolee Schneemann’s Diaries
The Carolee Schneemann Foundation and Stanford University Libraries are pleased to announce the digitization of six decades of Schneemann’s diaries, which will begin to be available on the Libraries’ website on October 12, the artist’s birthday. After a five-year research restriction following Schneemann’s passing in 2019, the public will have a new view into her life and work. The Foundation and the Libraries will continue to release materials from Schneemann’s career in successive rounds, with the years 1951 to 1978 available in this first round.
Over 3,700 scanned pages of Schneemann’s diaries reveal an intimate record of her life, creative work, and the poets, artists, and friends that comprised her social circle. Beginning with her time at Bard as an undergraduate, the journals chronicle her studies and first forays into teaching at the University of Illinois, as well as her travels to London, Paris, and Venice. Reflections on figures like Allan Kaprow, James Tenney, Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Carl Ruggles—and of course, her cats—pepper the anecdotes, inner thoughts, and daily movements Schneemann recorded.
The period of these journals offers valuable insight into Schneemann’s involvement in Judson Dance Theater and the works she produced during and after her time there, particularly Eye Body (1963), Meat Joy (1964), Fuses (1964–67), Water Light / Water Needle (1966), and Interior Scroll (1975). Writing was as integral to her work as drawing, painting, and performance. As Kristine Stiles noted in her 2010 book Correspondence Course, with Schneemann, the same eye “guides the hand that draws and writes.”
Schneemann’s meticulous details of daily life and her accounts of the conflicting forces on artists—to create, to archive, to administer, to promote—are maintained over decades in these journals. The public presentation of these diaries is one of the few ways in which a wide range of researchers can observe how Schneemann integrated her life and her artmaking.
The digitization and online publication of Schneemann’s diaries coincide with the Libraries’ recent acquisition of other archival materials preserved by the Schneemann Foundation that builds upon the Carolee Schneemann Papers it received in 2012. The newly acquired materials include correspondence, particularly childhood letters and early letters to and from James Tenney; notebooks and diaries dating from 2011 to 2019; writings on topics from cats to war to sex, many unpublished; exhibition files and press materials; detailed notes on individual artworks; and records of film and video distribution.
Researchers can access the physical Carolee Schneemann Papers, including the diaries, in the Special Collections and University Archives reading room at Stanford’s Cecil H. Green Library. More information on how to place requests and access the reading room is on the Libraries’ website at library.stanford.edu under “Explore Collections.” Online public access to the digitized diaries is available via Searchworks, the Libraries’ catalog.
Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019) was one of the most influential artists of the second part of the twentieth century. Her pioneering work in a range of media—painting, film, video, dance and performance, installations, and the written word—is characterized by radical formal experimentation and critical investigations of subjectivity, the erotic and taboo, images of atrocity, and the social construction of the female body.
Schneemann received a B.A. in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois. Originally a painter in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, Schneemann was uninterested in the masculine heroism of New York painters of the time and turned to performance-based work. Although renowned for her work in performance and other media, Schneemann began her career as a painter, stating, “I’m a painter. I’m still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas.”
Schneemann has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications throughout her six-decade career, including the retrospective Carolee Schneemann:Body Politics at the Barbican Art Gallery, London (2022–2023) and Carolee Schneemann:Kinetic Painting, presented at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in 2015–2016, the Museum für modern Kunst, Frankfurt, in 2017, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2017–2018. Her work has been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Reina Sofia, Madrid; Tate Modern, London; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, among others. Schneemann is represented by PPOW Gallery, New York. Film and video retrospectives have been held internationally, including at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Film Theatre, London; and Whitney Museum, New York. Recent publications include the book of interviews, From Here and Beyond (Kunsthalle Winterthur, 2022); a book of her early writings, Uncollected Texts (Primary Information, 2018); and the monograph Unforgivable (Black Dog, 2015). Schneemann holds Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees from the California Institute of the Arts and the Maine College of Art and, in 2017, was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale.
Top image: Carolee Schneemann at her desk in Belsize Park, London, September 1971. Photo by Anthony McCall.