His archive includes photographs of Buckminster Fuller, Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio, John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, Paul Jenkins and many others. The archive provides a template for new activity. It is an entry point for collaborative research and new forms of public participatory media; anyone can use the archive for their own creative purpose.

I invite people to bring their own work and memories to the images. A performance, a film, a sculpture, somebody else’s research: these responses make another archive around the photographs.

At mhPROJECTnyc in 2018, I projected the color slides for two hours each day across fourteen days. Each image appeared once. One camera faced the projection; another recorded the performers and viewers. It was a public image shiva: people could meet a photograph, respond to it, and leave something new behind.

Looking through the CHARAS material, I kept asking why these experiments with land, architecture and collective life were missing from the usual accounts of experimental art. The archive brings that question into the room. People should be able to use this history creatively and come to their own conclusions.