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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

Photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark (1943 - ) was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he worked with his mother as a baby photographer. While still a teenager, Clark began to take photos of his friends as they hung out, doing drugs. After attending the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee, and serving in the military from 1964 to 1966, Clark came back to Tulsa, returning to photography as well. His first book of photographs, Tulsa, came out in 1971, followed by his second, Teenage Lust, in 1983. He was awarded the International Photography Lucie Award for Achievement in Documentary Photography in 2005

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

View Cornell Finding Guide
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...