Since the early-1970s, Wendy Clarke has expanded the possibilities of using video as a medium for artistic expression and human connection. Her projects, including the Love Tapes, The Link, and One on One, invited people from a wide range of backgrounds to share their stories, insights, feelings. Encompassing hundreds of hours of footage, from across over a dozen video formats, the Wendy Clarke collection represents a unique audiovisual archive of American life. Through her process, Clarke invited participation that gave individuals agency and never reduced them to stereotypes. The WCFTR is pleased to be able to share the collection–now digitized, searchable, and richly described–with new audiences, allowing the voices within it to speak to us again.
In 2023, the WCFTR received a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to digitize, preserve, and publicly share the video archives of Wendy Clarke. The WCFTR successfully applied for a $298,292 NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Implementation Grant to better care for Clarke’s socially and artistically significant collection of 863 tapes, recorded on 13 different video formats, and share them with new audiences. The award was the largest federal grant for the WCFTR to date!
Supported by this NEH grant, the WCFTR worked to catalog and digitize nearly 1,000 video tapes from Wendy Clarke’s expansive collection. With support from the Department of Communication Arts, the AV Data Core, and DoIT Research Cyberinfrastructure, the majority of these videos are available online for immediate public viewing. The WCFTR team developed a website to share the collection (https://wendyclarke.wcftr.commarts.wisc.edu). The website lets users browse individual series to locate videos, as well as search within the contents of each video by querying specific words and phrases in video transcriptions. To provide additional entry points to Wendy Clarke’s incredible and expansive collection, our team has curated playlists of similarly themed videos as well as written exhibits to highlight specific facets of the collection.