#archives of american art

Cats didn’t need the internet to achieve feline fame. 

Our@archivesofamericanart has a new exhibition, “Before Internet Cats: Feline Finds from the Archives of American Art,” which explores how cats are represented in rare documents like sketches and drawings, letters, and photographs from the 19th century through the early 2000s.

We decided to let the cat out of the bag…er, box with this collage postcard sent from fiber artist Lenore Tawney to filmmaker Maryette Charlton. Tawney’s postcards often featured intricate layers of found media and handwritten notes. Animals, especially cats, were a frequent motif.

While we think the whole exhibition is purrfect (we couldn’t help it), here are some of our favorite pieces from the archives:

Georges Mathieu, a French painter, embellished this oversize letter to painter Hedda Sterne. It’s among the cat-themed correspondence from Mathieu that are in Sterne’s papers.

Cats often make ideal studio companions. They serve as sympathetic critics and elegant muses. 

In this photo, Pozy the cat watches muralist Edna Reindel work in her California studio. (Pozy is also the subject of the wall mural behind them.)

Photos of artists in their studios enhance our understanding of their stories and their working processes.

Reginald Gammon was known for his evocative portraits of prominent African Americans (and not cats) but in the mid-1960s he illustrated a children’s book that chronicles the friendship between a boy and a bespectacled cat.

Thousands of sketches in the Archives of American Art offer insight into artists’ creative processes. A 1948 sketchbook of watercolor studies by muralist and children’s book illustrator Emily Barto highlights the distinct personalities of several felines—here’s one taking a cat nap.

#BeforeInternetCats is on view through Oct. 29 in the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery (the first floor of the National Portrait Gallery). You can also paw your way through the exhibition online. 

On Friday, July 13, the Whitney will host Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic, a symposium that takes its name from an oral history project by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. The symposium welcomes conversations with artists, activists, and oral historians on memories of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and ‘90s. Learn more on whitney.org. 

[(From Left to Right: John Fekner, Jenny Holzer, David Wojnarowicz, Keith Haring and Michael Smith). “Urban Pulses” Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA 1983 Photo credit: David Lubarsky 1983 Courtesy John Fekner Research Archive]