Mina Loy's modernist archive

This essay explores how Loy approached her position on the margins of the avant-garde and cultural institutions, including museums, publishing houses, and libraries, as an impetus to create innovative, esthetic forms of collection, display, and preservation that commented on her liminal place in modernist culture. A case in point is Loy's 1950 assemblage “Househunting,” a meditation on the importance of portable domestic collections to her career alongside the avant-garde. The layered history of “Househunting” unfolded here—including its creation, exhibition, purchase, and travels following Loy’s death—illuminates how Loy's art and writing allowed her to theorize and build a modernist archive, shaping her archival legacy. In their democratizing aims, Loy’s archival collections can be compared to André Malraux's 1949 concept of the musée imaginaire (“museum without walls”), but they differ in their feminist attention to material locations and gendered meanings, central to the history of feminist and queer curatorial art.