The papers of multimedia and computer artist Fred Truck measure 15.4 linear feet and date from 1960-2019. Records include biographical material, correspondence including mail art, writings by Truck, project files, rare printed material including artist books and small press publications, artwork, and sound and video recordings. Additionally, a substantial portion of the collection is in electronic format, including Truck's hard drive and software programs developed by him.
Scope and Contents:
The papers of multimedia and computer artist Fred Truck measure 15.4 linear feet and date from 1960-2019. Records include biographical material, correspondence including mail art, writings by Truck, project files, rare printed material including artist books and small press publications, artwork, and sound and video recordings. Additionally, a substantial portion of the collection is in electronic format, including Truck's hard drive and software programs developed by him.
Correspondence and mail art documents Truck's involvement with the mail art network throughout his career and includes letters and mail art from artists including Anna Banana, Michael Gibbs, John Held Jr., Jürgen Olbrich, Lon Spiegelman, Chuck Stake, Chuck Welch, and many others. Also found here is a substantial group of letters from Jean Brown to Truck in which Brown comments on Truck's work, her connections with other artists, and her collecting activities focusing on Fluxus and the avant-garde, for the Jean Brown Archives.
Writings include early short stories, a play, and published articles and artist statements by Truck.
Truck's project files touch on all aspects of his career, including his making of artist books, his involvement in early and developing computer art and software, and his forays into virtual reality. Files also record his involvement in collaborative works of early electronic art including his significant contributions to the Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN), and his collaborations in performance art including The Des Moines Festival of the Avant-Garde, the Electric Bank, and the Performance Bank. Records include motion picture film of events that took place during the Des Moines Festival of the Avant Garde.
Exhibition files document six exhibitions including the group exhibition Almost Warm and Fuzzy (1999), at the Des Moines Art Center, and Here and There: Photography as a Cross-Cultural Mirror (2007), with Mano Tohei in Japan. Other professional activities are documented in files covering Truck's attendance and presentations at conferences and symposiums, on panels, and at the Banff Centre for the Arts where he undertook a residency in 1991. This series and Truck's personal business records also include scattered documentation of consignments, sales, and exhibitions with Vail Giesler/Steven Vail Galleries, and Karolyn Sherwood Gallery.
Printed material includes coverage of Truck's career in press reviews of his work and copies of two of his books, Around the House and The Hot Rod Show. The series also houses Truck's significant collection of rare artist books, artist publications, and small press publications. Additionally, Truck's printed material includes announcements, catalogs, newsletters, postcards, and other printed material for art events, literary press events, and mail art events primarily from the 1970s-1990s, including a substantial group of material from Franklin Furnace.
Artwork by Truck includes digital artwork and Fred Truck's print collection. Photographs include Truck's index to his digital photographs, some of his fine art photographic prints, and a series of snapshots taken of Truck and others on the occasion of La Mamelle Inc./Art Com's donation of its records to Stanford University.
Unprocessed born digital material appears to document Truck's research and practice in computer technology and art over several decades, including the online activities of ACEN. Additional born digital records include programs and software such as Truck's ArtEngine and Bottega.
Arrangement:
With the exception of some unsorted material, papers were generally organized alphabetically across projects, institutions, and individuals by Fred and Lorna Truck before donation to the Archives. Notes on Truck's career and an inventory of the sorted material providing folder labels and broad series types was included with the donation and both were used extensively during arrangement and description of the material. Series were further refined to facilitate access and merged with unsorted material. The collection was arranged as 10 series.
Series 1: Biographical Material, circa 1980s-2017 (Box 1; 3 folders)
Series 2: Correspondence and Mail Art, 1974-2017 (Boxes 1-4; 3.5 linear feet)
Series 3: Writings by Truck, circa 1960s-circa 2000s (Box 4; 0.25 linear feet)
Series 4: Project Files, circa 1960s-2017 (Boxes 4-7, 14, FC 15-16; 4.4 linear feet)
Series 5: Exhibition Files, 1988-2007 (Boxes 8-9; 0.25 linear feet)
Series 6: Other Professional Files, 1988-2001 (Box 9; 0.6 linear feet)
Series 7: Personal Business Records, 1960s-2006 (Box 9; 0.2 linear feet)
Series 8: Printed Material and Artist Books, 1960-2017 (Boxes 9-13; 3.2 linear feet)
Series 9: Artwork by Truck, circa 1990s-circa 2000s (Box 13; 0.15 linear feet)
Series 10: Photographs, 1980s-2019 (Box 13; 0.15 linear feet)
Series 11: Unprocessed Born Digital Material, circa 1970s-circa 2019 (Boxes 18-20; 2.5 linear feet)
Biographical / Historical:
West Des Moines, Iowa, multimedia and computer artist Fred Truck (b. 1946) played a pivotal role in the burgeoning computer art world of the 1970s, was an early and vital participant in the Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN; 1986–1999), one of the first virtual artist communities, and has been active in the mail art network throughout his career. Truck is a sculptor, a photographer, and a creator of artist books, software, and virtual reality artwork.
Born in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, Truck graduated from Iowa Wesleyan College in 1969 with a B.A. and then briefly attended American University in Washington, D.C.. From the mid-1970s to mid-1980s he worked in the printing trade and attended printing school in Ankeny, Iowa, where he was able to print the books he had been writing and making. His work included the offset book Camping Out (1975), and George Maciunas, Fluxus and the Face of Time (1984), in which which used his own Jean Brown Ultrabold typeface.
Truck was a co-founder and systems engineer for the Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN), an artist-built virtual social network established in the early internet era before the development of web-based graphics through which artists communicated and performed in text-based graphics. Truck established a menu-driven structure that would allow easy access to ACEN content invented collectively by Truck and co-founders Carl Loeffler and Anna Couey.
In the late 1980s to 1990s Truck developed ArtEngine, a stand-alone software application applying artificial intelligence to graphics, text analysis, and design. His software Bottega was an interactive CD-ROM developed for the Macintosh which allowed users to explore a digital artist's workshop and also introduced users to Analog Engine, a steam-powered visual analog of his ArtEngine software.
Truck is also known for his work with virtual reality and in 1993, with the assistance of programmers, built Labyrinth, a flight simulator based on Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine. The project took place at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Carl Loeffler.
In 1998 Truck created the fictitious Badge of Quality Corporation with Mr. Milk Bottle as it's public representative and himself as president and CEO of the corporation. In 2007 he was commissioned to build a 62" tall steel sculpture of Mr. Milk Bottle dissolving into nature.
Truck became interested in digital photography in 2005 and joined Flickr in 2009, where he continues to post his photographs. Truck is a pioneer in the use of stereographic projections and anaglyph images and describes his work as using digital processing to move his 2-D images into "a 3-D arena via anaglyph techniques, stereograms or 360 720 panoramas."
Provenance:
The collection was donated in 2020, 2021, and 2022 by Fred Truck.
Restrictions:
This collection is open for research. Access to original papers requires an appointment and is limited to the Archives' Washington, D.C. Research Center. Researchers interested in accessing born-digital records or audiovisual recordings in this collection must use access copies. Contact References Services for more information.
Rights:
The Archives of American Art makes its archival collections available for non-commercial, educational and personal use unless restricted by copyright and/or donor restrictions, including but not limited to access and publication restrictions. AAA makes no representations concerning such rights and restrictions and it is the user's responsibility to determine whether rights or restrictions exist and to obtain any necessary permission to access, use, reproduce and publish the collections. Please refer to the Smithsonian's Terms of Use for additional information.
Occupation:
Computer artists -- Iowa -- Des Moines Search this
Multimedia artists -- Iowa -- Des Moines Search this
The papers of African American sculptor, jewelry maker, quilter, and performance artist Joyce J. Scott measure 9.1 linear feet and date from 1948 to 2019, with the bulk of the material dating from the 1970s to the 2000s, and individual materials from 1914 to 1915, and from 1932. The collection consists of biographical material; correspondence; writings; professional files, including exhibition and project files, born-digital materials, and gallery records; printed material; photographic material, including photo albums; artwork; and audiovisual material, including recordings of performances and lectures.
Scope and Contents:
The papers of African American sculptor, jewelry maker, quilter, and performance artist Joyce J. Scott measure 9.1 linear feet and date from 1948 to 2019, with the bulk of the material dating from the 1970s to the 2000s and individual materials from 1914 to 1915, and from 1932. The collection consists of biographical material; correspondence; writings; professional files, including exhibition and project files, born-digital materials, and gallery records; printed material; photographic material, including photo albums; artwork; and audiovisual material, including recordings of performances and lectures.
Arrangement:
This collection is arranged as eight series.
Series 1: Biographical Material, 1948-1977, 1989-2015 (Box 1; 0.4 linear feet)
Series 2: Correspondence, 1972-2014 (Box 1; 0.5 linear feet)
Series 3: Writings, circa 1970-circa 2000s, undated (Box 1-2; 0.3 linear feet)
Series 4: Professional Files, 1970s-circa 2013 (Box 2, OV 10; 0.9 linear feet)
Series 5: Printed Material, 1914-1915, 1932, 1953-2018 (Box 3-5, OV 10; 2.5 linear feet)
Series 6: Photographic Material, 1971-2019 (Box 5; 0.2 linear feet)
Series 7: Artwork, 1987-1989, 1998-2006, undated (Box 5; 0.1 linear feet)
Series 8: Audiovisual Material, 1983-2006, undated (Boxes 5-9; 4.2 linear feet)
Biographical / Historical:
Joyce J. Scott (1948- ) is an African American sculptor, jewelry maker, quilter, and performance artist in Baltimore, Maryland. She is best known for her use of off-loom bead weaving techniques to depict the complexities of race, gender, and class. Born in 1948, Scott is the daughter of quilter and folk artist Elizabeth Talford Scott, from whom she learned quilting. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Master of Fine Art from the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. In 2016, Scott was named a MacArthur Fellow, and she was named the Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019. Her work is held in permanent collections across the country, including at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Related Materials:
Also found at the Archives of American Art is an oral history interview with Joyce J. Scott, 2009 July 22 conducted by Robert Silberman.
Provenance:
The papers were donated to the Archives of American Art in 2019 by Joyce J. Scott as part of the Archives' African American Collecting Initiative funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.
Restrictions:
This collection is open for research. Access to original papers requires an appointment and is limited to the Archives' Washington, D.C. Research Center. Researchers interested in accessing born-digital records or audiovisual recordings in this collection must use access copies. Contact Reference Services for more information.
Rights:
The Archives of American Art makes its archival collections available for non-commercial, educational and personal use unless restricted by copyright and/or donor restrictions, including but not limited to access and publication restrictions. AAA makes no representations concerning such rights and restrictions and it is the user's responsibility to determine whether rights or restrictions exist and to obtain any necessary permission to access, use, reproduce and publish the collections. Please refer to the Smithsonian's Terms of Use for additional information.
