Matchmaking in the Archive

March 24, 2023 - June, 2023

About the Exhibition

LGBTQ people owe a lot to past generations, yet our historical inheritances are still too often lost or buried. Working with the archives of the GLBT Historical Society, artist E.G. Crichton decided to do something to bridge this generational loss of memory.

Matchmaking in the Archive describes and shows E.G.’s seven-year project with the GLBT Historical Society to match about 25 living individuals to the archives of 25 individuals whose lives are embedded in the archives. She asked each participant to get to know their archive match and invent a response in any media. This exhibition shows some of the portraits E.G. made of living participants as they interacted with their archive matches. The resulting body of work has been exhibited and performed across the US and in several other countries: Australia, Italy, Netherlands, Great Britain, the Philippines, etc.

About the Book

In Matchmaking in the Archive: 19 Conversations with the Dead and 3 Encounters with Ghosts, E.G. takes us on a captivating journey through the archive and into the relationships she fostered between living and dead collaborators. This book, part of the new Q+Public series from Rutgers University Press, narrates E.G.’s matchmaking process, the intimate relationships that developed, and the creative work that emerged. She added three new collaborators, Jonathan Katz, Michelle Tea and Chris Vargas, who each describe their own encounters with the ghosts of queer history. Both text and images make the archive come alive in remarkably intimate ways.

Copies of the book are available on-site in our museum store and in our online book shop.

About the Curator

E.G. Crichton is an interdisciplinary artist living in Richmond, CA. Her projects have been exhibited in Asia, Australia, Europe, and across the United States. Crichton is a Professor Emerita at the University of California Santa Cruz, and served as Artist-in-Residence at the GLBT Historical Society from 2008 to 2014. More information is available on her website, here.