#50 The Acme Archive in our 50th year
50 stories from The Acme Archive
Acme Archive activities are framed within our National Archives supported project, an ongoing tenant engagement initiative throughout our anniversary year and beyond.
In late 2022, Stephen Cripps: In Real Life opened at Turner Contemporary, Margate, an exhibition which drew heavily on The Acme Archive. Curator Ingrid Swenson’s research for the show revealed that a piece of machinery in Acme’s archive store was in fact an artwork by Cripps, a self-propelling record turntable referenced in reviews of Halo Lines and by Richard Wilson at the Stephen Cripps: In Real Life live programme.
We have also completed the first year of cataloguing our tenancies archive. This project has made archive images and tenancy records more accessible for research, forming the basis of our 50 stories and allowing us analyse our development as an organisation. We use this data to geographically map our activity across London.
Our cataloguing project has revealed gaps in our documentation of artist experiences and informed a series of artist engagement events. These conversations have brought new contributions from artists to the archive, including stories and images about lived experience and previously unseen interior images of studio buildings.
Looking ahead, work is underway on digitising The Acme Archive to make it easily available for artists, researchers and sector colleagues.