Introduction
In 2009, on a pre-graduate school trip from Toronto to San Francisco, I visited the GLBT Historical Society Archives, where I happened upon E.G. Crichton’s exhibition, LINEAGE: Matchmaking in the Archive.
The exhibit used steel archival shelving and boxes made of transparent plexiglass to emulate the scene of archival research, with papers and objects displayed inside. Framed by these structures were eleven distinct areas with artworks created by contemporary artists in response to the archival remains of people who have passed. For the exhibit, Crichton took on the role of matchmaker, introducing each participating artist to a different archival collection found in the GLBT Historical Society Archives and, through that, to the person to whom the collection originally belonged. The artistic responses ranged from video documentation of a dinner party to an aria and libretto. Photographic portraits accompanied the art, showing pairings of the contemporary artists interacting with projected images of the dead. Totally taken with the exhibition and the relationships depicted, I told my sister, “I could write my whole PhD dissertation on this exhibit.” While I did not in fact write my whole dissertation on Crichton’s work, it did make its way into a chapter on the GLBT History Museum and in 2013 I had the pleasure of interviewing Crichton for my doctoral research.
In the fifteen years that have come and gone since my first encounter with LINEAGE, the exhibit and concept behind it has grown into nineteen matched pairs, numerous exhibitions around the world, and a book entitled Matchmaking in the Archive: 19 Conversations with the Dead and 3 Encounters with Ghosts (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2023). I was thrilled to have the opportunity in 2024 to once again converse with Crichton, this time over email, about the book and the project more broadly.