Digital archives and feminist art history: recovering marginalized documentation from 1970s New York

Artist archives and documentation practices of the 1970s preserved evidence of feminist and marginalized artistic practices during a transitional period in art history. This paper examines how pedagogical slide archives function as repositories of feminist art history, preserving visual records of women’s alternative spaces, body-based performance work, and environmental art practices that challenged patriarchal art world hierarchies. Through analysis of Ted Stamm’s 6,450 (35mm) slides representing 500 artists of New York’s art scene from 1968 to 1984, including approximately 20% women and 10% non-Western artists, this study discusses how digital accessibility transforms pedagogical materials into research resources that can reconstruct feminist art histories previously relegated to institutional margins. This overlooked collection enables digital humanities research that questions traditional exclusions.