SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 2026, 11AM - 2PM | YORK, MAINE
Community day #14 — Archive Live with the Archives of American Art: A discussion with Josh T Franco, Christa Blatchford, and Olga Herrera ‘22
Join us for our 14th Community Day as we welcome collector-at-large Josh T. Franco of the Archives of American Art for Archive Live: The Beverly Hallam Papers. He will be joined in conversation by Joan Mitchell Foundation Executive Director Christa Blatchford and art historian Olga U. Herrera ‘22 for a discussion exploring the life and work of Beverly Hallam.
Beverly Hallam (1923-2013) was an artist, professor, and one of Surf Point’s founders, alongside philanthropist and arts patron Mary-Leigh Smart. Hallam taught at Mass College of Art and moved to Maine in 1963 to work full time as an artist. An early experimenter with acrylics, she produced a wide range of works in many media including painting, photography, and graphic arts. Hallam maintained an active studio at Surf Point until her death on February 21, 2013. She helped envision Surf Point as a retreat for artists. Surf Point carries forward this vision through the Foundation’s residency program and preservation of her home and archival materials. Read more about Beverly Hallam here.
The Beverly Hallam papers are divided between the Archives of American Art and Surf Point Foundation. For this program, Franco has selected documents from the Archives’ portion of the collection that connect closely to Hallam’s life and work in Maine. These materials will be discussed alongside selections from Surf Point’s archive to bring attention to the work and legacy of Hallam, and illuminate an interesting case of a split collection with two attentive and collaborative stewards.
Community Days are open and free to the public; please register for address and directions. For those who are able, we invite you to make a suggested contribution of $25 to support our public programs.
About the presenters
Josh T Franco
Josh T Franco (b. 1985) is an artist and art historian from West Texas who believes that art history is made by hand.
As an artist, Franco’s primary medium is the discipline of art history itself. Using performance and a variety of materials, he transforms the components of being an art historian—reading, writing, annotating, sketching, lecturing, looking, museum going, archival research and so on—into artworks appropriate for museums and galleries and their audiences. Franco’s art has been exhibited and supported by Co-Lab Projects, Esperanza Peace & Justice Center, WorkSpaceBrussels, Mini Art Museum, NurtureArt Gallery, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, DePauw University, HistoryMiami Museum, Studio SoHy, Elsewhere Museum, Addison Gallery of American Art, Agave Festival Marfa, Zygote Press, The Future Mpls, 516ARTS, Olga Korper Gallery, Albuquerque Museum, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Davis Gallery, Syracuse University Art Museum, Art Bridges Foundation, Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, ICA Philadelphia, and the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. In 2025-2026, Franco is NEH Innovator in Residence at Colorado College.
As an art historian, Franco has presented scholarly and critical work in venues including Stanford University, College Art Association, Utrecht University, HEMI Graduate Student Initiative (Hemispheric Institute), zingmagazine, The Frick Collection, Third Text, Latino Art Now!, Joan Mitchell Foundation, OCTOBER, Independent Curators International, Gulf Coast, Latino Studies, and The Journal of Feminist Scholarship. He has written exhibition-related text for Theaster Gates, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Charlotte Hallberg, Zoe Leonard, Miguel Luciano, Hiram Maristany, and Joshua Saunders among others. His book, Marfa, Marfa: Rasquachismo and Minimalism in Far West Texas, forthcoming with Duke University Press, is supported by a Terra Foundation for American Art Publication Grant. His dissertation on the same subject was completed at Binghamton University (2016). He completed a BA in Art History at Southwestern University (2007).
Christa Blatchford
Christa Blatchford, Executive Director of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, directs the vision of the Foundation with the Board of Directors, and oversees the programming, administration, and operations of the Foundation’s New York headquarters and the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, LA. Christa previously served as the Foundation’s Artist Support Director, and then Deputy Director, overseeing national programs including the inaugural years of the Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) Program.
Having been a practicing artist herself Christa has been dedicated to the support of visual artists throughout her career. Before joining the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2009, Christa spent three years as a Program Officer at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), working to provide a variety of professional development opportunities for artists. She has also worked with a range of non-profit visual arts organizations including Minetta Brook and Eyebeam. At Minetta Brook, she worked on critically acclaimed programs such as Robert Smithson’s Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island. She currently serves on the Surf Point, an artist residency program based in ME. Christa Blatchford received her Masters degree in Fine Arts from Hunter College in 2005, taught at Hunter’s Undergraduate Art Department, and has shown her artwork throughout New England. Christa resides in Croton-on-Hudson with her husband and two children.
Olga Herrera ‘22
Olga U. Herrera is an art historian, independent curator, and scholar. She is currently Managing Director of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on the intersections of globalization, networks of cultural production, and circulation of modern and contemporary art of the Americas. She is the author of American Interventions and Modern Art in South America (University Press of Florida, 2017) winner of the 2018 SECAC Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication; Toward the Preservation of a Heritage: Latin American and Latino Art in the Midwestern United States (University of Notre Dame, 2008); and editor of the books Scherezade García: From This Side of the Atlantic (AMA, 2019), and iliana emilia García: The Reason/The Object/The Word (AMA, 2019). Her essays and interviews have appeared in publications of the International Center of the Art of the Americas, Archives of American Art Journal, MIT ARTMargins, Diálogo, Public Art Dialogue, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, and others. Herrera holds a Ph.D. in Latin American modern and contemporary art history and theories of globalization from George Mason University. She is the founder of Artista, a Latinx and Latin American women artist digital platform.