Vaughan Rachel Collection

Collection

Identifier: RACH

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

The Vaughan Rachel Collection contains correspondence from Jill Johnston to Vaughan Rachel. The correspondence include envelopes, letters, and additional material such as articles and event invitations contained within the envelopes as they were donated. The letters cover a range of personal and professional topics including Johnston’s work at Art in America, the New York Times and the Village Voice. Several of Jill Johnston’s major works are discussed in the letters including “Mother Bound” (1983), “Paper Daughter” (1985) and “Jasper Johns” (1996). The letters contain personal information about Johnston and Rachel’s children and family, health struggles, finances, as well as exchanges about work, art, friends, relationships, travel, and more. The collection also includes Rachel’s original artist book “Family Business,” and a catalog/art book associated with a 1988 Vaughan Rachel Exhibit at Gallery 25 in Fresno, CA. The collection also includes black and white workprint photographs by Vaughan and Sherry Brody of feminist organizing in California (1971-1992). The collection also contains production records and black and white photographs by Vaughan Rachel capturing the making of “Visible Lives - Vintage Voices,” a documentary about older lesbians made by the organization Southern California Women for Understanding.

Dates

Creation: 1975-2004, [bulk 1975-2000]

Conditions Governing Access

The collection is open to researchers. There are no restrictions on the collection.

Conditions Governing Use

Property rights to the physical objects belong to the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives. All other rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or heir for permission to publish where the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives do not hold the copyright.

Biographical / Historical

Vaughan Rachel (b. 1933) is an artist, photographer, and feminist community organizer from Oakland, CA. Vaughan is a photographer working in black and white and color formats whose primary subjects are her artist friends and family. She also photographed the landscape of the Negev desert in Israel. She has self-published multiple one-of-a-kind artist books including, “Thirteen Stories,” and “Family Business.”

Vaughan Rachel earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts (1973) and Master of Fine Arts (1975) in Photography from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. She also studied painting at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Art in New York City (1954). Vaughan Rachel taught photography at Ambassador College, Pasadena, California, in 1976 and was a slide curator at California Institute of the Arts from 1971 to 1975. She worked as a photo assistant at Astra Image in Los Angeles in 1979. In the 1980s Vaughan Rachel was a photography instructor at Otis/Parsons in Los Angeles and a resident artist-photographer at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art.

Vaughan co-founded the Pasadena Women's Political Caucus in 1970. Later she became a member of XX, a Feminist Women Artist Collective in Los Angeles.

Jill Johnston (May 17, 1929 – September 18, 2010) was a cultural critic for The Village Voice, writer of “Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution,” and a leader with the lesbian separatist movement of the early 1970s.

Jill was born in London, England, and grew up in Little Neck, Queen, New York. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Tufts in 1955, she received a master of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Jill began working at the Village Voice in 1959. She started her career as a dance critic, and later took on multimedia arts and cultural criticism of all kinds.

In the early 1970s she became a vocal advocate for lesbian separatism and argued in “Lesbian Nation” (1973) for “a complete break with men and with male-dominated capitalist institutions.”

Jill’s other works include, “Jasper Johns: Privileged Information” (1996), which explored artists’ processes and homosexuality; and memoirs “Mother Bound” (1983) and “Paper Daughter” (1985), both subtitled “Autobiography in Search of a Father.” Through the 1980s-2000s, Jill wrote for Art in America and The New York Times Book Review. She also wrote other books, including “At Sea on Land: Extreme Politics” (2005).

Sources: Vaughn Rachel, “About,” Vaughn Rachel/Artists Rights Society, accessed August 15, 2023, http://www.vaughanrachel.com/about.html

William Grimes, “Jill Johnston, Critic Who Wrote ‘Lesbian Nation,’ Dies at 81,” New York Times, September 21, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/arts/21johnston.html

Extent

1.08 Linear Feet (3 boxes)

Language of Materials

English

Additional Description

Abstract

Vaughan Rachel is an artist, photographer and feminist organizer. Vaughan was a founding member of the Pasadena Women's Political Caucus and a member of XX, a Feminist Women's Artist Collective in Los Angeles. The collection is comprised of original artist books and photographs by Vaughan Rachel, production materials and photographs from the documentary “Visible Lives - Vintage Voices,” and personal and professional correspondences from Jill Johnston (May 17, 1929 – September 18, 2010), a cultural critic, leader with the lesbian separatist movement of the early 1970s, and writer of “Lesbian Nation” (1973).

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Vaughan Rachel donated material to the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives via mail circa 2012. “The Visible Lives - Vintage Voices,” was donated circa 1994.

Processing Information

This collection was processed by Vera Tykulsker in 2023 under the California State Grant.

The letters in the collection were not arranged in chronological order as donated nor was there any other obvious original order. Instead, the processing archivist imposed a chronological order according to the stamp date on the envelopes. If there was no stamp on the envelope, the date on the letter within the envelope was used instead. Some envelopes contained multiple letters spanning multiple dates/years. All letters contained in a single envelope have been kept together. Some letters were dated differently than the date on the envelope in which they were found. For consistency, these letters have been kept with their envelope and arranged chronologically according to the date on the envelope.

The Artworks Series includes original pieces by Vaughan Rachel as well as catalogs and documentation associated with her art. Photographs may also be attributed to Sherry Brody. The “Gallery 25 Catalog” was originally found in the front cover of the “Family Business” book. It has been removed and stored in a separate folder. All materials related to “Visible Lives - Vintage Voices” have been physically arranged together.