Time Capsule Trunk - Unboxing

ELAINA: Hi! I’m Elaina Vitale, one of the Time Capsules project catalogers. MARIE: I’m Marie Elia, also a cataloguer. ERIN: And I’m Erin Byrne, also a cataloger. ELAINA: We’re here today to open our Time Capsule trunk. We’re going to film it so that you all can see what’s inside it. Not all of the Time Capsules came in the cardboard boxes that you might have seen us open before on film - some are in filing cabinets, and one is in this trunk. So, we’re not sure what’s inside it, but we’re going to take a look today. ERIN: Ok - we’re going to open it now. ELAINA: On top we have... a garment bag of band uniforms. So, Erin, we’re going to have to... ERIN: So our next thing - we have another jacket. There are some symbols on the button - I can’t recognize them - we also have a tag that says 1819 - and it looks like ‘Chet’, C-H-E-T. Perhaps this is a military jacket of some sort, so it could be pretty old and fragile. ELAINA: It looks like we have two more under it. MARIE: These look like tails. This looks like a tux jacket. We’ll go your direction. MARIE: It looks like if we get this sweatshirt out, then we can probably start getting the paper. ERIN: This is a yellow sweatshirt that we have. A lot of the clothing in here we are going to try to re-wrap so it is better suited when it goes back into storage, so that the seams themselves won’t rot, or any damage will acquire that way. ERIN: Next on top we have a box from...Harry Abrams. It’s pretty heavy, it feels like there are probably books in here. MARIE: It looks like a lot of what’s in here are magazines. For instance we have a Newsweek from 1966, ooh - Afterdark. Diverse titles and various publications. I see Esquire in here. ELAINA: The Newsweek is - the cover story is - ‘In Cold Blood: Truman Capote’s Hot Book’. MARIE: There also seems to be a number of books in here. There are a couple of books about film... a german language book. ELAINA: On top of this black box there is an invoice for something, that was sent to Jed Johnson. We get a lot of these. MARIE: I think we’ve talked in previous videos, when we’ve opened Time Capsules, that there may be items that will reveal themselves to be of interest, but until we open everything up we won’t know unless - from the sender or what have you - that it’s not necessarily obvious because we have a lot of correspondence in here as well. So we won’t know until we open and read it. ELAINA: Oh! What is this? This is a folder that says ‘Happy Butterfly Days’. I think that we may have the original of this in our collection. And it has a note inside that ‘this Vanity Fair butterfly folder was designed for your desk by Andy Warhol’. And it invites you to ‘use it as a folder or frame the pair separately’. MARIE: You’ll notice we’re not in our usual workspace. We’re in the hallway outside of the archives processing area, just for the simple reason that this trunk is very large and we wanted to minimize handling and have it in an open space where we can walk around it and be able to unpack the objects safely. I’m not sure of the measurements of this trunk, but you know, obviously it’s much larger than we’re used to dealing with. When we first opened it we got excited and thought maybe it was cedar-lined. But actually, if you’ll notice, it’s lined with paper to look like cedar. ELAINA: This is a photo on the back of which is written ‘6/2/69, Jed Factory and Andy’s Little Office. Cut out stones from Cartier catalogue coming out of his pants. Idea for Rolling Stones album’. And beneath that, there’s another note that says ‘Dear Jed, has it really taken Andy two whole years to do the Stones album? Love, Brigid’. ERIN: So the next item we have is this interesting looking belt. The belt buckle itself might be actual brass, it’s pretty heavy, and it looks like it’s hand-painted, and the name ‘Andy’ on it. There is also just a little box next to it, too. MARIE: I do remember a couple of years ago we were processing a Time Capsule finding either - I think was photographs or photocopies of photographs maybe - from Brigid that referenced that idea for the Rolling Stones cover. It’s interesting - the longer you work on this project the more you see the connections between the items in the Time Capsules. You just remember ‘oh, we found that letter about that’, ‘we found that photograph’. It starts to bring it all together, which is exciting when we start thinking about finishing this process and being able to put together things that - documents that connect all of the items together. ERIN: So we have an early Cosmopolitan from 1966. These are always funny and fun to look at. The magazines seem to be from the ‘60s generally, I think a lot of the correspondence is from the ‘70s in this box. We’re not really sure of the general time period of when this was put together. MARIE: We’re getting to the point where there are a number of brittle newspapers. And again, the difference between unpacking a Time Capsule and unpacking the junk in your attic is that - you’ll see Erin’s holding up the lid of the trunk, and we’re taking out things one-at-a-time just - everything in here is considered artwork and we can’t just pile this stuff on the table. MARIE: One of the things we found in this trunk Time Capsule is this large photograph of Warhol with a bunch of his people. I think some of the coolest stuff we find are the photographs. ELAINA: Marie commented earlier on the brittle condition of many of the newspapers inside this Time Capsule. It’s not uncommon for newspapers to get acidic with time, and that’s one of our many preservation challenges. A lot of our Time Capsules are full of newspapers - Warhol loved to collect headlines of newspapers. So we have to take care when processing these boxes to build proper homes for our brittle materials. A lot of our 3-D objects too need to be housed properly. It’s not common in archives to put everything back in the box from where it came if its, you know, a delicate item, but the Time Capsules remain a whole item so all of the items have to go back inside, which means that we spend a fair amount of time building appropriate homes for our materials. MARIE: One of the fun and challenging parts of cataloguing these Time Capsules is finding stuff like this - just a bag of... I don’t know what, yet! There’s a compass in there, there’s receipts, there’s what looks like a zippo lighter, there’s... batteries - yeah. Why are all of these things in this bag? There’s a negative in there. We’ll take a look in there and see if there’s any documentation for it- if there’s a note with it. But you know, who knows why these were all put in a bag and put in this Time Capsule. ELAINA: There’s a red box that I’m holding here, and inside it there’s a number of correspondence from Andy’s mother Julia. So this is one of the really exciting things about the Time Capsules - sort of piecing together Andy’s life and his family’s life. There’s also a number of religious paraphernalia in here, so this will be a fun item to go through. ELAINA: This is a customs tag with Julia Warhola’s handwriting on it. We know that Julia had very beautiful handwriting. It’s hand writing that Andy used in some of his art and that we actually use in our cafe downstairs. It was award-winning writing, it was just very beautiful and we love to find good examples of it. There’s a tiny envelope postmarked from Pittsburgh which caught my eye, and inside there was tiny little birth announcement introducing someone new. And it is for Mark Andrew Warhola born on February 16, 1960, so this would have been - is - Andy’s nephew. And there’s a handwritten letter too. ERIN: We have this large Saint Laurent bag. It’s pretty hefty. It looks like it’s got prescription bottles, soaps, all kinds of things. MARIE: We just found this box of 8” x 10” black and white photographs. I haven’t looked through all of them yet, but I did notice that there were a couple of Warhol when he was a little bit younger - seems to be taken in the factory. There’s this photograph - she’s holding a Pabst Blue Ribbon - this photograph caught my eye. I think we’ve seen prints of this image before. I like finding photos of Warhol filming or taking photos in-action. What’s this? Famous banana! ERIN: Ok so we finally made it part-way to the bottom of the box - you can see the bottom. It looks like the remainder is mostly newspapers, letters, more magazines. A lot of this stuff we’ll have to figure out what it is after we sort it on the table. On top of the stack of newspapers we have in here we have The New York Mirror - it’s from August 1962. The headline is about Marilyn Monroe’s death. It’s ‘Joe’s Goodbye: A Kiss, A Rose - I Love You, He Weeps Over Marilyn’. It’s not uncommon to have these in the Time Capsules. We’ve had Time Capsules before that were entirely newspaper covers so, Warhol actually saved a few of the headlines from around Marilyn’s death. MARIE: We have gotten to the bitter end of the Time Capsule trunk, and what you see at the bottom are lots and lots of little pieces of the brittle newspaper. I have begun trying to collect some of the scraps and I’ve gotten to the point now where I need to get my tweezers. Tweezers! ERIN: Tweezers! MARIE: ...And start picking up some of the scraps. We will collect as many pieces as we possibly can - there’s teeny teeny ones that will go by the way-side, but we’ll collect what we can. ERIN: Ok we’ve finally gotten everything out of the trunk, so you can see on the table behind us and that cart - all of this stuff came out of the box, so it’s going to be a pretty long time for us to catalogue all of this. We’re pretty excited! The trunk itself is pretty interesting. We had guesstimates that it might weigh about half a ton, but whatever it really weighs it was very heavy. We had to use our art handlers to help us get it out of storage. ELAINA: Now that we have everything out of Trunk 1, the three of us will have to sit down and sort all of these items into their appropriate series. We have everything in here from artwork to toys and recreational material. We’re not entirely sure of the date range of this box, but it looks like stuff from the early ‘60s to the mid ‘70s, so that would be something that we would have to determine once we are able to look more closely at what we have here. We think this is probably the equivalent of four Time Capsules of stuff, so it’s going to take us a while.