ARCHIVES & ARCHIVAL SERVICES

Boo-Hooray is dedicated to the organization, stabilization, and preservation of archives that are representative of 20th and 21st century cultural movements. This process is handled from the initial stages of field excavation in attics, basements, and storage spaces all the way through to the final placement of the inventoried archive in an academic institution.

Previous archives have been placed with institutions such Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Georgetown University's Special Collections Archive, Harvard University's Harvard Theatre Collection, Cornell University’s Division of Rare Manuscript Collections, University of Miami's Special Collections Library, and the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

Boo-Hooray has handled the archives of artists like playwright and theatrical producer Douglas Turner Ward (Emory), painter Jane Dickson (Cornell), beat pioneer William S. Burroughs (Emory), visual artist, filmmaker, and rapper Fab Five Freddy (The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture), performance artist Joey Arias (Harvard), filmmaker and beat poet Ira Cohen (Yale), and musician and poet Angus MacLise (Columbia). In addition, we have placed movement-wide archives like the “May 1968 Paris Uprising Collection of Posters and Ephemera” (Yale), “The Punk History Archive”, “The Hip Hop History Archive”, and "The Latin Music Archive" (Cornell), alongside institutional archives like “The Amsterdam News Photography Archive” (Cornell), The Living Theatre Archive (Yale), and the Paddington Print Shop Collection (Victoria and Albert Museum).

Douglas Turner Ward (1930-2021) was an actor, playwright, director, and theatrical producer whose work has been integral to shaping black theater in the United States. Along with Robert Hooks and Gerald S. Krone, Ward co-founded the Negro Ensemble Company in 1967, of which the founding principle was creating and performing black theater for black audiences by black artists.

This archive consists of play scripts performed and written by Negro Ensemble Company members, extensive manuscript writing and notes pertaining to Ward’s many projects encompassing theater, film, and television, business records of the NEC, photographs of the NEC, personal and professional correspondence, ephemera...

The Bob Dylan vs. AJ Weberman Collection gathers rare books, magazines, flyers, letters and ephemera from the career of A.J. Weberman, the world’s first and foremost “Dylanologist,” who printed and distributed the first bootleg of Bob Dylan’s experimental novel “Tarantula,” before it was published in 1971; both editions included in the materials below.

A.J. Weberman, a wire-headed Yippie stoner, self-described “underground cat and garbologist,” became obsessed with and terrorized Bob Dylan in the late 1960s, when he attempted to decode the Nobel Prize winning musician’s lyrics with a crude “hemeneutical” approach he termed “Dylanology.” Weberman advanced a “Current Bag” (C.B.)...

Published by drag queen Linda Simpson [aka Les Simpson], My Comrade was an underground gay culture zine that set itself apart from the deluge of Xeroxed zines popping up in New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Through parody of both mainstream tabloid magazines and the self-serious gay press, a campy and ironic sensibility, and radical Left sympathies and slogans, My Comrade captured the zeitgeist of the gay downtown scene. Publishing 10 issues between 1987 and 1994, My Comrade documents the last years of gay culture before marriage equality and representation at elite levels of American society became...

The archive of filmmaker and music journalist Mary Harron, known for her early punk reportage and her successful career as writer and director of I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), American Psycho (2000), and The Notorious Bettie Page (2005). The Archive gathers Harron’s research, correspondence, interviews, and production materials, documenting the process of this icon of feminist cultural production.

The Mary Harron Archive also serves as an exemplary collection of the larger punk movement as related to women. Throughout her career, Harron defined and documented punk during its nascent stages as a downtown DIY culture and existence as a mainstream media...

Punk zines, art zines, sex zines, and movie zines started snowballing in popularity during the 1980s. The late 1980s saw the publication of Factsheet Five, functioning solely as a pre- internet sourcebook for zines. In New York, on 7th Street in the East Village, the shop See Hear sold fanzines exclusively. By the early 1990s, within the milieu of Larry Clark’s Kids, zines mushroomed again, punk- style, but quickly became an outlet for the young and vibrant community of visual artists that grew out of the skateboarding community. Ryan McGinley, Dash Snow, Jason Dill, Patrick Griffin, Mark Gonzales, Harmony Korine...

Everett Redd was born on June 7, 1924, in Goodman, Mississippi. He served in the U.S. Army from 1943-1945, after which he relocated to Los Angeles, California. Over the years, he was employed by an unspecified plant and the County of Los Angeles's Building Services Department. In addition, he and his brother, Sherman, ran a maintenance business. He also managed, and possibly owned, a motorcycle bar and clubhouse called The Tropical Inn. Redd was a motorcycle enthusiast who, according to his memorial service program, started a motorcycle magazine in 1964 called BAM Motorcycle. He also wrote a newsletter for cyclists, The Tropical...

Salvatore Mercuri is a collector of materials related to the Velvet Underground. The Salvatore Mercuri Velvet Underground collection contains audio and video recordings, correspondence, memorabilia, photographs, and publications related to the music and history of the band and its members.

The Salvatore Mercuri Velvet Underground collection dates from the 1960s to 2017, and contains items collected by Mercuri that are related to the music and history of the Velvet Underground and its band members. Most of the collection is devoted to the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed's solo career after he left the band, but there are also materials from...

Michael H. Shamberg (October 27, 1952 - November 1, 2014) was the founder and head of Factory Records New York, as well as the director and producer to many of New Order’s music videos. His close relationship with the band played a large part in their success in America. Born in New York and raised in Baltimore, Shamberg returned to New York in the mid-1970s after completing school at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1981, he founded Factory Records US.

Through Factory US, Shamberg did much to design and influence New Order’s image, linking them with artists such...

The Screamers, a West Coast experimental punk music group, was formed in 1976 by Tomata du Plenty and Tommy Gear. Noted for using synthesizers instead of guitars, for early attempts to establish a wide video presence, and for having been one of the most unforgettable West Coast bands in performance, the Screamers neither signed a record contract nor recorded any of their songs during their years of existence.

Du Plenty, born David Harrigan (1948-2000) came to San Francisco in 1968 where he performed with the Cockettes, a local theatrical ensemble troupe of mostly gay hippies who favored gender-bending, glitter-laden drag...

Piero Heliczer, born in Italy in 1937, was a poet, filmmaker, and publisher active in underground art scenes, working and living between New York, Paris, Amsterdam, and London. While attending Forest Hills High School in New York, he met Angus MacLise, who would later become the first drummer for the Velvet Underground. Heliczer entered Harvard in 1955, staying there two years before moving to Paris. In 1958 in Paris, with MacLise, he founded The Dead Language Press, and began letterpress printing now-rare books of art and poetry as well as broadsides by himself and others, including Jack Smith’s The Beautiful Book...

Lester Bangs, born Leslie Conway, (1948-1982) was an American music journalist, author, and musician. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential rock critics from the late 1960s throughout the 1970s. Most known for his writings published in Creem and Rolling Stone magazines, he also wrote for The Village Voice, Penthouse, NME, and others. Bangs began freelancing with Creem in 1970 and moved to Detroit when he became the magazine's editor in 1971. He left Creem in 1976 and moved to New York City. His writing style was critical, conversational, boldly honest, and passionate about the music that he...

Joey Arias is a performance artist, cabaret singer, and drag artist, whose collected archive spans a singular career from the 1970s to present day. From his 1979 appearance with Klaus Nomi as David Bowie’s backup performer on Saturday Night Live to his 2011 surrealist puppet show with puppeteer Basil Twist titled “Arias with a Twist”, Arias’ life and work is not easily encapsulated into a linear narrative or singular descriptor.

The Joey Arias Archive collects documentation from every stage of his career and his many forms of performance. The archive documents his youth in Los Angeles playing in punk bands...

Paddington Printshop began in 1972 when Jon Philips, a recent art school graduate, used his limited knowledge of screen-printing techniques to construct a home studio, where he completed freelance assignments for anyone from Roberto Matta to small local businesses, theaters, and community organizations. In 1974, offered a space at a local community center and aided by Arts Council funding, Philips, along with Pippa Smith, formed an official print shop that ran according to the following two principles:

“That it should teach people new and useful skills. [And] That it should encourage them to use those skills in the artistic or...

Douglas Turner Ward (b. 1930) is an actor and playwright whose work has been integral to shaping the story of black theater in the United States. Along with Robert Hooks and Gerald S. Krone, Ward founded the Negro Ensemble Company in 1967, of which the founding principle was black theater for black audiences by black artists.

The Douglas Turner Ward Archive is the most comprehensive collection ever assembled related both to his work and the activities of the Negro Ensemble Company. The archive helps to illustrate the growth of black theater in the United States, elucidating the struggles for rights...

Fab 5 Freddy a.k.a. Fred Brathwaite (b. 1959) is a visual artist, filmmaker, rapper and producer. A regular guest on Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party and star of Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style, he was also the host of the integral television program Yo! MTV Raps. Fab 5 Freddy was the key figure in bridging the gap between the New York downtown art scene and the graffiti and hip-hop culture of Uptown and Brooklyn. Freddy first gained notoriety as a member of the Fabulous Five graffiti crew, painting subway trains and city buildings along with Lee Quiñones. An essential figure and frequently...

The Rainbow Family of Living Light is a collective of individuals who have spent decades cultivating an international community that comes together for massive demonstrations called Rainbow Gatherings with no one spokesperson in hopes of showing a peaceful alternative to a destructive and consumerist world. Established in 1970 by Garrick Beck and Barry “Plunker” Adams, The Rainbow Family attracted like-minded people along the west coast from networks established in alternative communities, traveling concert-goers, and new age spirituality enthusiasts to plan out what became the first Rainbow Gathering located in Strawberry Lake, Colorado in 1972. Beck’s vision of a large temporal...

This archive comprises material related to the life and work of painter Jane Dickson and filmmaker Charlie Ahearn, and their life and partnership intertwined with the careers of their peers in the downtown New York art world of the 1970s and 1980s. The range of material roughly describes the emergence of that community through Ahearn’s/Dickson’s participation in the artist's groups Collaborative Projects (Colab) and Fashion Moda, as well as their involvement in three highly influential art exhibitions in the latter half of the 20th Century: the Real Estate Show (1980), the Times Square Show (1980), and the “Messages to the...

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Exhibit: Punk Magazine Mutant Monster Beach Party

Punk Magazine was founded in 1975 by John Holmstrom, Ged Dunn and Legs McNeil. The publication’s use of “punk rock” led to its worldwide acceptance as the defining term for the bands that were producing a new sound and stance during the mid-1970s. Fifteen issues were published between January 1976 and October 1979. A special issue was produced in 1981 to commemorate the release of the Sex Pistols documentary DOA.

Punk quickly became the premier vehicle for examining the American underground music scene, predominantly at CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City in...

View The Punk History Archive in Ezra, Cornell's Quarterly Magazine

The Punk movement of the 1970s and early 1980s had a deep impact on music and film, and also revolutionized design in graphics, fashion, typography, collage and mimeograph art, providing direction for both today’s DIY culture and haute couture. Johan Kugelberg founded the Cornell University Punk History Archive. The holdings have since increased with materials donated by author Jon Savage (England’s Dreaming) and record executive Geoffrey Weiss.

The archive consists of approximately 3,000 items documenting English and US punk, and post-punk music, ca. 1974-1986. There are approximately 365 flyers and posters...

View Paris - May 1968 at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

The events of May 1968 reverberated globally. While French students were leading the nation into a veritable revolution, waves of revolt spread across Europe, Mexico, and Czechoslovakia (culminating in the Prague Spring uprising). The Student Revolt in Paris remains iconic though. Its proliferation outward to other sectors of French society culminated in a vast general strike that paralyzed the government, and very nearly toppled the De Gaulle administration.

Contributing to the momentum of May ’68 dissent was the Atelier Populaire, a workshop of students and teachers from...

Living Theatre Records at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

About Living Theatre at Yale

The Living Theatre was founded in 1947 by Judith Malina (1926 - ), who studied theatre with Erwin Piscator, and Julian Beck (1925-1985), an abstract expressionist of the New York School. During its active existence, until 2013, the company staged almost one hundred productions, performed in eight languages in 28 countries, on five continents, proving to be one of the more influential groups in postwar theatre. In the 1950s and 60s the Living Theatre did unconventional stagings of poetic drama, including works by Gertrude Stein...

View the University of Miami Special Collections, Zine Collection

Lenny Kaye (b. 1946) is the guitarist for the Patti Smith Group and also a music historian and journalist. He compiled the 1960s garage rock compilation Nuggets in 1972, which had a profound impact on the development of Punk rock. Lenny's early influences as a writer and enthusiast in music developed during his time in science fiction fandom. This collection of approximately 2100 fanzines is Lenny's personal library.

Science fiction was one of the early subjects that spawned a substantial network of self- published magazines and newsletters, done primarily via mimeograph. Ranging from...

View Emory University's Raymond Danowski Poetry Library

The Semina Archive at Emory University's Raymond Danowski Poetry Library contains a full-run of all nine issues of Wallace Berman’s legendary publication, along with mail art, posters, and supporting books and periodicals.

Semina bridges appropriation, fine printing, punk-style DIY and collage/montage, this already in the late 1950s. Michael McClure called Semina “a scrapbook of the spirit.” Outside of commerce, it was sent through the mail to Wallace Berman’s friends like David Meltzer, William S. Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi, Allen Ginsberg, and Cameron. The components of Semina were not only submitted, but appropriated from these friends, alongside personal heroes like W. B....

View the Cornell University Music Archive
Exhibit: American Sabor: Latinos in U. S. Popular Music, Atlanta History Center, GA

The Latin Music Archive contains material related to Latin-American music in the United States, with a special focus on New York City and the Bronx in particular. Many of the materials in the archive were exhibited as part of the Smithsonian Institute’s traveling exhibition “American Sabor: Latinos in U. S. Popular Music.”

Manuscript and correspondence in the archive include material from Izzy Sanabria and Tito Puente, such as holographic manuscript invoices from Izzy Sanabria to Alegre Records, billing them for iconic cover...

View Cornell Hip-Hop Collection
View Cornell Registry of Digital Collections
View Joe Conzo's Photography on Shared Shelf Commons

Joe Conzo, Jr. first met members of the Cold Crush Brothers in 1978, while he still attended South Bronx High School. The Cold Crush Brothers, an important and influential early hip hop group including DJs Charlie Chase and Tony Tone, and MCs Grandmaster Caz, JDL, Easy AD, and Almighty Kay-Gee. Becoming the group’s professional photographer, Conzo documented their live performances at the T-Connection, Disco Fever, Harlem World, the Ecstasy Garage, and the Hoe Avenue Boys’ Club. He also shot photos of other hip hop...

The Jetboy & The Sunset Strip Archive consists of 178 fliers, posters, handbills, press releases, and fan club mailers that are some of the best examples of graphic design in the Los Angeles Sunset Strip hair metal scene of the late 1980’s. Jetboy were a band that failed to find the fame and fortune that many of their peers did but not for lack of trying. They exemplified what others on the Sunset Strip were striving for but who became victims of over-saturation and shifts in culture towards the late 1980’s. Among the fliers included are bands who would go on to...

View the Georgetown University Libraries

The Jack Womack Flying Saucer Library is an astounding collection of popular and fringe thought dedicated to the flying saucer phenomenon that gripped the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. Assembled by Philip K. Dick Award-winning author Jack Womack, this library is important not only in its scope, but in the curatorial expertise that hand-selected the most representative publications of this movement.

The onslaught of Flying Saucer sightings, beginning in the summer of 1947, is remarkable not only because they were reported so widely, but because so many people felt compelled...

The Jack Womack Author’s Archive contains working manuscript and typescript drafts of five of the Philip K. Dick Award-winning author’s novels. Many of the novel manuscripts, particularly Ambient and Terraplane, are present in multiple drafts with extensive holographic annotations. There are also extensive electronic drafts, correspondence, related media, books with contributions by Womack, inscribed books by other notable authors, and ephemera in the archive.

Beyond Womack’s own drafts and work as author, this collection also contains substantial materials related to award-winning science fiction author William Gibson. Most famous for Neuromancer, Gibson has been a longtime friend and correspondent of Womack’s...

View the Yale University Library Catalog

Video: Jefferson Street - The New York Underground

Ira Cohen (1935-2011), American poet, artist, underground filmmaker, and photographer, spent the early 1960s in Tangier, Morocco, where he lived and worked with William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Paul Bowles, publishing a broadsheet by Burroughs as well as preparing his first major work, the anthology Gnaoua (1964), which contained work by Burroughs, Gysin, Jack Smith, and others. It is notably featured in the cover photograph of Bob Dylan’s album, Bringing It All Back Home.

After returning to New York in the late 1960s, Cohen developed and perfected the “mylar...

Ian Dury (1942 – 2000) was an influential UK musician and songwriter. A victim of polio in his childhood, he studied at the Royal College of Art before joining other musicians on the pub-rock circuit, employing in his music elements of jazz, reggae, and classic British Music Hall. He is best known as the leader of Ian Dury and the Blockheads, who gained renown in the late 1970s, early 1980s. “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick,” on Stiff Records, reached #1 in the UK. Dury prior fronted the important pub rock group Kilburn & The High Roads. He continued to...

View The Cornell Hip-Hop Collection

The core of the Hip Hop History Archive at Cornell University was established by Johan Kugelberg, who sought to locate and preserve the earliest artifacts he could find pertaining to the origins and influence of hip hop as music, culture, and community in the Bronx, New York City.

In 2008, Kugelberg founded the Cornell University Hip Hop History Archive, which has since grown to include other collections such as the archive of early hip hop photographer Joe Conzo, Jr, containing over 10,000 prints and negatives; the archive of Charlie Ahearn, director of Wild Style (1983), the first...

View the Georgetown University Archives

The Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo Collection consists of 12 manuscript items, 67 monographs by or with contributions by Rolfe, 87 secondary works on or related to Rolfe, 30 periodicals, 28 photo prints, and 9 pieces of ephemera.

Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, also known as Baron Corvo, was an eccentric author associated with the Yellow Book circle and fin-de-siècle decadent culture. A convert to Catholicism, Rolfe studied to be a priest, but was rejected. He wrote short stories for the Yellow Book, and painted religious banners with boy-saint motifs. He had a poem...

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Edward Davis Wood Jr.’s career as an author of pornographic pulp fiction is even more complicated and unusual than his career as a film director. By the early 1960s, having run out of the funding needed to continue making his own movies, he began writing pornographic literature for quick money (as well as working, when he could, on porn films – softcore in the 60s, hardcore by the 70s). Using a variety of pseudonyms as well as his own name, he published and republished books under different titles, for the sort of publishers whose...

Ed Sanders (1939 - ), American poet, singer, social activist, environmentalist, author, and publisher hitchhiked from Missouri to New York City in 1958 to attend New York University, from where he graduated in 1964. He founded and edited Fuck You / a magazine of the arts in 1962, which he printed on a mimeograph machine, featuring work by such contributors as Julian Beck of The Living Theatre, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and W.H. Auden. Fuck You ran until 1965.

Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore on East 10th St. in New York’s East Village, which served as a center for local...

The Black Panther Party, or BPP, was a black revolutionary socialist organization active in the United States from 1966 until 1982. Internationally known through its involvement with the Black Power movement, the group was founded in Oakland, California, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, at first offering to protect black neighborhoods from police brutality, espousing socialist and Marxist doctrines. At FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s command the party was under constant surveillance by the time membership reached a peak of 10,000 in 1969, beginning to contract soon after due to ongoing legal troubles, internal splits, defections, and incarceration.

The Black...

View Angus Maclise Papers archive on Columbia University Libraries Archival Collections

Exhibit: Dreamweapon: The Art and Life of Angus MacLise (1938 – 1979)

Exhibit: The Bardo Matrix, Grolier Club, NYC

Video: Jefferson Street - The New York Underground

American artist, poet, percussionist, and composer Angus MacLise was active in New York, San Francisco, Paris, London and Kathmandu from the 1950s through the 1970s. Best known as the original drummer of the Velvet Underground, MacLise’s lifework included music, calligraphy, performance art, poetry, drawings, plays, and limited edition artists’ books.

A collaborative partner in the early 1960s with art groups and individuals such...

View Cornell Hip Hop Collection
View Afrika Bambaataa Appointed Visiting Scholar at Cornell University
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Exhibit: The Afrika Bambaataa Open Archive @ Boo-Hooray/Gavin Brown's Enterprise

As Afrika Bambaata’s archivists, Boo-Hooray placed the legendary hip hop pioneer’s vinyl record collection with Cornell University in 2013. Bambaataa’s vinyl archive is not only important because of its scope, encompassing over 42,000 records of every genre, but because it is these very records that laid the initial blueprint of the world’s most popular genre.

Afrika Bambaataa is considered the godfather of hip hop culture and was instrumental in the rise of electro funk...

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View True Norwegian Black Metal: Special Edition in the webshop

Compiled by Johan Kugelberg in 2008, “The Black Metal Music Collection 1985-2008” contains original source material on the subgenre of Black Metal music, focusing on Scandinavian participants, some of whom in the 1990s turned to the worship of Odin, burning down wooden churches, and in general attempting to offend the greater society.

Included in the archive are fanzines and magazines such as Black Flame, Grimoire of Exalted Deeds, and Slayer. The video and audio archive holds LPs, VHS cassettes, bootleg audio cassettes, and DVDs. There are manuscripts...

View the Cornell University Finding Guide for The Amsterdam News Photography Archive

Founded in 1909 by James H. Anderson, the New York Amsterdam News is one of the oldest African-American owned and run newspapers in the country. By the 1960s, the newspaper had become a major voice in the national African-American community, offering extensive coverage of the civil rights movement. Beginning in 1982, the newspaper was edited by Wilbert A. Tatum, under whose guidance the newspaper remained a spirited voice in local and national affairs. In 1996, Tatum turned control of the newspaper over to his daughter, Elinor Tatum, who...