Barbara Rosenthal Journals, 1960 - 2025

ARTIST'S STATEMENT:

I began keeping a "Dear Diary," as many little girls do, when I was 11 years old, and in the Sixth Grade, Miss Berlin's class, at the Monroe Street School in Franklin Square, Long Island, New York, 1959. There is a code to the pages, which I don't remember, but perhaps someone might decipher some day: I remember that the way I wrote the acrosstick "N O T H I N G H A P P E N E D" meant that something important happened, and that the way I crossed the letters and folded down the page was mnemonic. It was a small white leather-bound volume with gold edging and a little gold lock and key. I still have it, kept with the other volumes, in the "Trunk of Journals" in the eMediaLoft archive [editor's note: now archived at Queens College Library Special Collections and Archives).

The next volume, a Five Year Diary, however, unfortunately, is missing. I do still have its box. It was a green leather-bound 5-year volume, wherein the pages are designed to be written across from day to day, and girls are encouraged to write each year in different color inks, which I did from 1960-65. These were my youth at Alva T Stanforth Junior High School, when I was editor of the "Signature" and won First Prize in the Science Fair, which led to my being assigned to an army-led program for budding astrophysicists and aeronautical engineers: the Instrumentation and Automation Program of Sewanhaka High School. I was the only girl, I was 15, I was headed for psychosis, I was not permitted to quit; instead I was sent to "art school." I began at The Brooklyn Museum for two years, and then The Art Students League for two more. I got out of the physics concentration and became editor of The Arrow. I turned down a full merit scholarship of English study at Vassar, to study art at Carnegie-Mellon. This is the 5-year diary that is missing.

Volume 3 picks up as I leave for college. There are 78 Volumes now. A few others had gone missing, but then been miraculously found by strangers, and returned from various parts of the world! One, Volume 6, is now as this very web page is under development over 40 years later, is playing a part in solving an international conspiracy assassination report. Most have been scanned. A few are online as is, in whole or in part, a few of my artist books and videos include them. Each current one is always within arm's reach.

The Journals have been the repository of all my first germs of thoughts -- because as soon as an idea of any kind plurps into my mind, I grab the Journal and a pencil (sometimes a pen). Then at some later date, when I'm culling materials to combine into another Project, I come across some little gem, and pluck it from the Journal-vault, and use it in some way in an emergent work of art: Some Projects have sprung exactly from it, such as "Homo Futurus," "Button Pins," "Provocation Cards,""Handwriting Analysis," etc. But some also in deliberate opposition, such as "Wish for Amnesia."