AFA Library Collaborates with Faculty to Develop Arts DVD Collection

The Helen Topping Architecture and Fine Arts (AFA) Library has closely collaborated with faculty at the Roski School of Fine Arts in building one of the best artist video/dvd collections in California, now numbering around 300 titles. Since 2003, Dean Ruth Weisberg and Roski faculty have supported the AFA Library's acquisitions of a broad range of documentaries of performance art in the 1970s and 1980s, recent experimental and select feature films, and works of video artists. Recent acquisitions include the landmark video works "Spiral Jetty" by Robert Smithson and "Meat Joy" by Carolee Schneemann. Other significant artists whose videos have been added to the collection include Valie Export, Susan Lacy, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Pipilotti Rist, and theatrical artists Meredith Monk and Robert Wilson. The collection supports the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of academic research at USC. Housed on permanent reserve in the AFA Library, it is widely used for courses in fine arts, theater, and cinematic arts, as well as art history, literature, and history courses at USC College.

The artist videos are complemented by architectural design videos, which are also housed in the AFA Library. Last year, the School of Architecture requested that its alumni, wishing to honor the life of a prominent Southern California landscape architect and USC alumna Jade Satterthwaite, contribute to a special library fund. As a result, AFA was able to acquire architecture and urban studies documentaries on such diverse topics as the history and development of Levittown, the landscaping design of Chicago parks, and the changing streetscape of Beijing. In addition to students in architecture and landscape design, these documentaries benefit researchers in history and in urban planning. The art and the architecture videos are cataloged in HOMER, the USC Libraries' one catalog, and are available to the USC community for 3-day loan.