Conversations in the Archives | Tempestt Hazel of Sixty Inches From Center

Tempestt Hazel, Writer, Curator, and Co-founder of Sixty Inches From Center | Recorded July 2024

For this episode, Hauser & Wirth Institute Executive Director Lisa Darms spoke with visionary writer and curator Tempestt Hazel. Tempestt talks about the family collections that inspired her; how she came to study art history, and how her disagreements with the discipline inspired her to start Sixty Inches From Center; the creativity that comes from collaborations between artists and community archives; and the shifting relationship of archives to the past, present and future.

Sixty Inches From Center is a collective of arts workers, writers, editors, artists, curators, librarians, and archivists who promote and prioritize the preservation of culture within Indigenous, diasporic, queer, and disability communities of the Midwest.

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Tempestt Hazel is a curator, writer, and co-founder of Sixty Inches From Center, a collective of editors, writers, artists, curators, librarians, and archivists who have published and produced collaborative projects about artists, archival practice, and culture in the Midwest since 2010. Across her practices and through Sixty, Tempestt has worked alongside artists, organizers, grantmakers, and cultural workers to explore solidarity economies, cooperative models, archival practice, future canon creation, and systems change in and through the arts.

An especially cherished moment for Tempestt was when she received the 2019 J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists, which was the result of a nomination by archivists and members of The Blackivists.

Tempestt was born and raised in Peoria, Illinois, spent several years in the California Bay Area, and has called Chicago her second home for over 16 years.

Mentioned during the conversation:

Sixty Inches From Center
Ebony and Jet Archives
Dawoud Bey
Cecil McDonald
Amy Mooney
Madeline Murphy Rabb
Chicago Archives + Artists Project
Leather Archives & Museum
Ivan Lozano
Media Burn Archive
Chicago Archives + Artists Project: Case Studies in Collaboration
2024 Chicago Archives + Artists Festival
Toni Morrison: The Site of Memory