This artists’ collective and archive developed organisational skills from precedents such as the Heresies Collective, which avoided the Art Workers’ Coalition’s (AWC) disorganisation. Conceived by Lucy Lippard in 1979, Political Art Documentation and Distribution (PAD/D) formally began with a meeting in February 1980 to explore ways to archive Lippard’s growing collection of documents sent to her by socially active and political artists disregarded by the mainstream art world. Around 50 artists, writers and professionals attended, including Clive Philpot, director of the MoMA Library, who suggested the collective’s title and arranged the eventual donation of the PAD/D archive to MoMA in 1989. In 1993, aware of this ironic contradiction, Lippard described the “Trojan horse” presence of PAD/D in the museum as “archival activism”.

Courtesy of DarkMatterArchives.net