Edited with an introduction by Marie Warsh
​Contributions from Nicole Miller, Chelsea Spengemann, Sara VanDerBeek, and Marie Warsh
Interview with Martha Edelheit by Mirra Bank and Chelsea Spengemann
Afterword by Mirra Bank

Susan Brockman (1937-2001) was a filmmaker and artist based in New York City and Easthampton, NY. Known for her experimental films Depot (1970) and Hothouse Flower (1978), made while a member of the collective Women /Artist/ Filmmakers, she also worked as an editor of art films and documentaries. During the 1980s and 1990s, Brockman began to focus on photography, developing an innovative approach to framing, printing, and collage, and had several exhibitions in New York and Japan. Throughout her career, she worked with many influential figures in the film and art worlds, including Willem de Kooning, Robert Frank, Dan Graham, Sally Gross, Peter Hujar, Kazuko Oshima, Linda Rosenkrantz, and Anita Thacher. Brockman received numerous grants during her lifetime, including from the Jerome Foundation, the National Endowments for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts. In 2023-2024, New York Women in Film and Television Women’s Film Preservation Fund supported the preservation of Depot and Hothouse Flower, which are now held by Anthology Film Archives in New York.

Marie Warsh is a historian, writer, and the deputy director of Soft Network. She is also codirector of the estate of Rosemary Mayer and has edited several publications about the artist, including Excerpts from the 1971 Journal of Rosemary Mayer (2016/2020) and Temporary Monuments: Work by Rosemary Mayer, 1977–1982 (2018) with Max Warsh, both published by Soberscove Press.

Mirra Bank is an award-winning film producer and director and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She also directs theater and is a lifetime member of the Actors Studio.

Martha Edelheit is an artist known for her explorations of eroticism and involvement in the feminist art movement. She was a founding member of Women/Artist/ Filmmakers, a member of Fight Censorship, and involved in many groundbreaking women-only exhibitions during the 1970s.

Nicole Miller is a writer, editor, and teacher whose work has appeared in numerous publications. She edited Writing Toward Dawn: Selected Journals 1969–82 by Donna Dennis (Bamberger Books, 2024) and contributed to Donna Dennis: Poet in Three Dimensions (The Monacelli Press, 2023).

Chelsea Spengemann is the executive director of Soft Network, which she cofounded in 2021. She has been involved with the estate of Stan VanDerBeek since 2008, most recently co-organizing the exhibition and coediting the catalog for VanDerBeek+VanDerBeek at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (2019).

Sara VanDerBeek is an artist whose interdisciplinary practice centers upon photographic reproduction, its history, and its evolving contemporary forms. Recent work has focused on museological practices of collection and display. Within this context, VanDerBeek highlights women’s ongoing contributions to the larger material and visual cultures upon which institutional collections and art historical narratives are built. She is also a cofounder of Soft Network.

Soft Network empowers contemporary artists and those working with artists’ estates to imagine and implement new and sustainable legacy models. This book is the first in a series that will focus on the organization’s core offering, the Archive-in-Residence, a fully-funded program of support for estates and archives in need of assistance. Through research, archiving, public programs, digitization, exhibitions, and publications, Soft Network preserves and provides access to the work of vital yet often vulnerable experimental artists and those who care for them.