New Collections: Michael Brewster Papers and Elyn Zimmerman Papers

This entry is part of an ongoing series highlighting new collections. The Archives of American Art collects primary source materials—original letters, writings, preliminary sketches, scrapbooks, photographs, financial records, and the like—that have significant research value for the study of art in the United States. The following essay was originally published in the Spring 2024 issue (vol. 63, no. 1) of the Archives of American Art Journal. More information about the journal can be found at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/aaa/current.

A new collection and a significant addition deepen the Archives extensive holdings of the papers of postwar Los Angeles artists.

The papers of Michael Brewster (1946–2016), organized by his archive manager Homer Charles Arnold, and donated by his partner, Karen L. Anderson, contain a wealth of materials related to his groundbreaking career as a sound artist. Numerous files document the development and realization of works, including his first “flasher” configurations, some of which involved floating electronic blinking lights in bodies of water. In 1970, Brewster pivoted to site-specific, immersive, and temporary “acoustic sculptures” and “sonic drawings,” also amply documented in exhibition files. The collection features many sound recordings, some of which capture carefully tuned tones at specific sites, while others record the artist’s verbal descriptions as he walked through exhibition spaces with a tape recorder. In an essay included in the papers entitled “Gone to Touch,” Brewster details his use of sound, echo, and reverberation to create “standing waves” by bouncing sound back upon itself. “It’s a bit like trapping the sound with its own reflected image, its echo,” he explains. Sound seems to “hang in place”—“stilled as if strobed.”

The papers also include photographs and slides of Brewster’s workspaces. An especially large cache documents the artist’s participation in The Museum as Site, an influential group exhibition of site-oriented sculpture held in 1981 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Brewster’s contribution, Attack and Decay, located outside between the museum and the neighboring La Brea Tar Pits, consisted of a rhythmic pulse of sharp tonality that pierced the ambient soundscape of splashing water and the voices of curious visitors. Researchers will enjoy listening to several recordings of the slow throb of slightly out-of-phase tones, as well as examining schematics and drawings. Correspondence with curator Barbara Haskell tracks the evolution of Brewster’s ideas for the project, and press clippings capture its reception.

The Elyn Zimmerman Papers record a second Southern California artist’s interest in the resonance of architectural spaces, but this time regarding light. Zimmerman’s (b. 1945) recent addition to the papers she donated in 2015 includes documentation of some of her earliest and most significant works, many of which were temporary and left little trace in terms of testimonials. This revelatory new material offers scholars ample opportunity to grasp the crucial, if frequently overlooked, contributions Zimmerman made to the Light and Space conversation. The donation features images of art created in the late 1960s, when she was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, and notebooks brimming with technical information for exploratory work in resins and fabrics. A group of preparatory drawings and installation photographs depict Zimmerman’s innovative glass plank installations, dating from the early 1970s, for which she leaned transparent glass planes against her studio wall and illuminated them from oblique angles, creating powerful shadow patterns. These images and drawings reveal the full range of experiments the artist conducted with these groundbreaking sculptural installations, not only those that made it into exhibitions.

Also included are materials related to Zimmerman’s Equivalent Abstractions series, dating from 1974–75, for which she presented parallel rows of photographs and graphite drawings of the progressive movements of light shafts in her studio over the course of the day. In a journal from the mid 1970s, we find her jotted thoughts about these sequences. “Everything around the room is soft—except for the shaft of light—very hard with some soft edges—but it is the only real contrast.” We read, for instance, that she liked to take her photographs from waist level, because, as she puts it, this “raises the floor plane—compressing the space.” Additional journals include reflections regarding Zimmerman’s personal life, including the challenge of being a woman artist, forays into the ancient Chinese divination manual the I Ching, and visits to Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in Northern California, where she occasionally collected flowers and pressed them between journal pages, where they remain today.

Together, the Brewster and Zimmerman materials make possible new research and scholarship around the work of two poorly understood yet crucial participants in the postwar Southern California art world, both of whom explored the ambient qualities of architectural spaces. These collections add to the widening picture of site-specific practices on the West Coast, while drawing attention, in Zimmerman’s case, to an important woman artist who made a major contribution to Light and Space art.

Matthew Simms is the Gerald and Bente Buck West Coast Collector for the Archives of American Art.