Kitasono Katué, Collaged Scrapbook, Mid-1920s, from The John Solt Kitasono Katué Archive

About Us:

Unforgotten Archives is a company dedicated to the preservation of literary and artistic histories through the placement of archives and collections at university libraries and museums, and the publication and exhibition of significant works that have fallen into disregard.

What we do:

We assist in organizing, cataloging, and preserving both paper and digital archives, as well as arranging for donation or sale to institutions where they can be made available for research. We also help to organize the exhibition and publication of archival material.

Our clients:

Past and present clients are academics, writers, poets, galleries, collectors, and visual artists, along with their families or estates. We specialize in modern and contemporary poetry, literature, art and theory, and pride ourselves in working with archives and people we thoroughly admire, considering each project to be an intellectual and artistic collaboration.

Our Services

  • We are adept at arranging and cataloging large and small archives and collections according to the latest professional standards accepted by libraries and museums.

  • We help to find the best options for you in selling or donating your collection or archive, ensuring that it is treated with care and made available for study, exhibition, and research.

  • We have helped organize exhibitions and events centered around archives, and worked on a number of editorial projects from archival sources. We have also created a number of digital exhibitions, websites, and online publications.

  • We conduct archival research to locate items in libraries, museums, and private collections, for academics, collectors, films and other archival projects. We also conduct research into the provenance of art, books, and archives.

Selected past projects

  • The Kitasono Katué Archive

    The Kitasono Katué Archive documents the life, work, and milieu of one of the key figures in global modernism generally, and the Japanese avant-garde in particular. Assembled by the poet, translator, and biographer of Kitasono, John Solt, it is the most comprehensive collection on Kitasono and his circle in the world. Material from the collection has been drawn from to create several exhibitions in Japan and the United States, including the 2013 retrospective on Kitasono at LACMA. An online exhibition and research hub for the archive is currently online here.

  • The Lynne Lawner Papers

    Lynne Lawner is a poet, art historian, photographer, and translator. Her diaries and papers capture 70+ years of moving across languages and continents, documenting her own work as well as encounters and friendships with such major European and American writers as Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, Guiseppe Ungaretti, Rafael Alberti, Max Frisch, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, Pasolini, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Alberto Moravia, Robert Lowell, and many others. She is pictured above with Marianne Moore in 1955.

  • George Morgan Papers

    Beginning in Brown University’s applied mathematics department, Professor George Morgan published several signifiant works in the field before he began an intellectual revolution at Brown with a series of courses that evaded the narrow confines and boundaries of academic disciplines. The peer and correspondent of major mid-century intellectuals like Lewis Mumford and Erich Kahler, he is widely credited as the "intellectual architect" of Brown University’s open curriculum. Iconoclastic, humanistic, and an acute social and cultural critic in prescient works like The Human Predicament: Dissolution and Wholeness (Brown University Press, 1967), Morgan was a beloved mentor to generations of students at Brown.

  • Cellblock Visions Collection

    The Cell Block Visions Collection is comprised of art collected by Phyllis Kornfeld during nearly half a century of teaching art classes in prisons. Currently housed at A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton, MA, this collection was the subject of the book Cellblock Visions: Prison Art in America (Princeton University Press, 1997). Reviewing the book for the Los Angeles times, the poet Adrienne Rich praised it as “notable for the variety and emotional depth of the artworks reproduced, the words of the inmate artists and for Kornfeld’s unsentimental and lucid text." Fielding Dawson, writing for The American Book Review, called it “breathtaking.”

Interested in working with us?

We’re always looking for new archives to work on, and are happy to help advise artists, writers, academics or institutions regarding arrangement, preservation, cataloging, and the placement of papers and collections. Fill out the form below to be in touch!