Below is a timeline of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.'s history written by Martha Wilson.

2016

April
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. celebrated its 40th anniversary as an organization.

2015

November
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Franklin Furnace Fund with a public event held at Pratt Institute that included presentations from the 2015 fund recipients.

2014

December
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. relocated to Pratt Institute under a long-term "nesting" agreement with the university.

August
The Weissman Family Foundation, Inc. provided Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. with $100,000 to upgrade the organization's computer hardware and to upscale Franklin Furnace's arts-in-education program, SEQuential ART for KIDS.

2010

June
The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. a two-year grant to digitize and publish online their records of performances, installations, exhibitions, and other events produced from 1986-1996. This project expanded upon a recent initiative to publish documentation from Franklin Furnace’s first decade of events on their website and on ARTstor. Through this grant, Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. preserved and cataloged artifacts from singular variable media works of social, political, and cultural expression.

May
The JPMorgan Chase Foundation awarded Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. a $25,000 grant to support the 25th Anniversary Year of SEQuential ART for KIDS. By enhancing ways of learning through creative, hands-on collaborations between students, teachers, artists, and the community, SEQ ART developed the "multiple intelligences," which are forms of visual-spatial and intra-personal intelligences. Over the past 25 years, SEQ ART graduates have demonstrated increased vocabulary; general and specific knowledge awareness; and an improved understanding of the arts in relation to other disciplines.

2009

November
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. presented The History of the Future II, honoring artist Guy de Cointet (1934-1983) who was known for his encrypted works on paper, theatrical productions, and readymade language. The event featured live performances, reconstructions of historic works, and brand new pieces by a number of artists. The History of the Future II included video documentation of performances that changed cultural discourse during the last three decades.

August
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. launched its Event Archives online. The database contains information about every performance, installation, exhibition, or benefit presented by Franklin Furnace. It also contains images of events presented during Franklin Furnace’s first ten years as an organization from 1976-1985. Major support for the Event Archives was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Booth Ferris Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts' Digitization Initiative.

March
Martha Wilson: Staging the Self opened at the Dalhousie University Art Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. This exhibition of Martha Wilson’s artwork from 1971 to the present was complimented by a selection of materials from Franklin Furance’s archive. It included documentation of work by Eric Bogosian, Jenny Holzer, Tehching Hsieh, Ana Mendieta, and Shirin Neshat, among others. Martha Wilson: Staging the Self was organized by Peter Dykhuis, Director of Dalhousie University Art Gallery, and Martha Wilson.

2008

July
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. received support from the Starry Night Fund of Tides Foundation with matching increased by the Jerome Foundation, which enabled Franklin Furnace's peer-review panel to award $70,000 to eleven artists selected from among 465 proposals sent to the Franklin Furnace Fund.

2007

June
Franklin Archive, Inc. presented Five Alive from Franklin Furnace, which included artwork by Yvette Helin, Julie Laffin, Pat Oleszko, Nicolas Dumit Estevez, and William Pope L.

April
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. presented The History of the Future: A Franklin Furnace View of Performance Art, a one-night event that celebrated the organization’s 30 years of fostering, preserving, and proselytizing visionary art.

February
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. celebrated ten years as a virtual organization presenting avant-garde art online.

2006

September-November
Martha Wilson presented History of Disappearance at MuseumMAN as part of the Liverpool Biennial.

August
ARRESTING ARTISTS: Franklin Furnace Artists and the Long Arm of the Law was exhibited at Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. The artists featured in the exhibition were subjected to arrest, defunded from major organizations, or attacked by the press for their explicit artworks. Featured artists included Reverend Billy, Carnival Knowledge, Billy Curmano, Dawn Egazarian, Karen Finley, John Fleck, Tehching Hsieh, Holly Hughes, Joshua Kinburg, Yury Gitman, Tim Miller, and Por El Ojo. ARRESTING ARTISTS was conceived by Coordinator Dolores Zorreguieta, and curated David Howe, Eunyoung Ju, Anastasia Latsos, Elaine Saly, and Terence Trouillot.

July
ARTstor collaborated with Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. to digitize and distribute archival documentation of Franklin Furnace events with the goal of embedding the value of ephemeral practice into art history.

May
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. received a two-year grant of $124,030 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize and publish on the Internet records of performances, installations, exhibits, and other events produced by the organization during their first ten years.  Franklin Furnace created an online database where users can access remaining artifacts from singular works of social, political, and cultural expression.

April-June
TRACE: in New York was a retrospective that celebrated TRACE, an international center for installation and real-time art based in Wales. The exhibition featured reconstituted elements from live performance or action-based processes. Exhibited materials included objects, documents, photos, detritus, texts, drawings, and sculptural or ersatz ethnographic displays.

April
WOOLOO PRODUCTIONS’ (Martin Rosengaard & Sixten Kai Nielsen) presented AsylumNYC as part of Franklin Furnace’s 30th anniversary celebration at White Box in Chelsea. This performance installation revealed the challenges that artists from abroad experience when working in the United States. On April 24, 2006, ten young artists from different countries arrived in New York to apply for “creative asylum” at White Box. The gallery was converted into a “detention center,” and the artists were not permitted to leave the premises for the rest of the week. One of the participating artists, Dusanka Komnenic, was selected to receive free help from an immigration lawyer to apply for an O-1 Visa for “extraordinary ability in the field of arts.” Komnenic was granted the privilege to remain legally in the United States for three years.

2005

June
The History of Disappearance, an exhibition of materials drawn from Franklin Furnace’s archives, opened at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, United Kingdom. This major exhibition traveled to Galleria Neon in Bologna, Italy (2006); the Liverpool Biennial in Liverpool, England (2006); the Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda in Santiago, Chile (2007); Sydney Underground Film Festival, Sydney, Australia (2008); Arhus Kunstbygning/The Aarhus Art Building, Arhus, Denmark (2010-2011); and PHOTOIRELAND FESTIVAL, Dublin, Ireland (2011). This major exhibition included a symposium on June 18 and concluded on September 3, 2005. The program featured performances by Billy Curmano, Andrea Fraser, Teh-Ching Hsieh, and William Pope.L. Martha Wilson later presented the video portion of History of Disappearance on November 8-9, 2015 at Laznia Center, in Gdansk, Poland. 

May
The Franklin Furnace Alumni Art Sale at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, raised over $60,000 for the organization’s programs by selling works of art by artists who received the Franklin Furnace Fund.

2004-2005

November-January
An exhibition of artists’ books The C-Series: Artists’ Books & Collective Action was mounted at The Nathan Cummings Foundation in New York. Curated by Courtney J. Martin, these works were selected from among third, or “C” copies returned to Franklin Furnace after its collection of artists’ books was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1993. A symposium on a “Day Without Art” was presented in conjunction with the The C-Series exhibition and featured presentations by Jon Hendricks, Conrad Gleber, Edmonia Lewis, and Clarissa Sligh.

2004

November
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Franklin Furnace Fund. As part of the event, Franklin Furnace announced the 2005 Fund for Performance Art Awards in Celebration of the Jerome Hill Centennial (founder of Jerome Foundation in St. Paul, MN) at the SculptureCenter. The celebration included performances by 2004-05 fund awardees Gary Corbin, Nicolas Dumit Estevez, Melissa Madden Grey, and Lance Horne. These performances were juxtaposed with video works by awardees Cave Dogs, Ex.Pgirl, Red Dive, and Alexander Komlosi.

October
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. moved from the financial district in Lower Manhattan to 80 Arts—The James E. Davis Arts Building in the cultural district of Brooklyn, New York.

July
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. applied for the first time to the National Endowment for the Humanities to publish its first ten years of events records online.

2001

January-November
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. celebrated its 25th Anniversary Season with an exhibition at MoMA’s library, an Artport site at The Whitney, an issue of TDR: The Drama Review, and an event Rhizome Remix at Galapagos Celebrating Franklin Furnace's 25th Anniversary. Franklin Furnace awarded its $25,000 McMartha Award to artist/architect Kyong Park for his project Adamah—a vision of a new society built upon the xeric urban space left in Detroit, Michigan as the affluent population moved out of downtown to the suburbs. Documentation of Franklin Furnace’s 25th Anniversary Season can be viewed online here.

2000

January-December
The Future of the Present program is redesigned as a residency in collaboration with the Parsons School of Design to provide artists access to a full range of digital tools. Following the launch of this residency, Franklin Furnace Archive's website received 79,000 hits per month.

Franklin Furnace's Archives of the Avant-Garde project received support from the New York Foundation for the Arts and The Cowles Charitable Trust, enabling them to create a Location Database of art spaces founded after 1960 in greater New York. The project organized art spaces into categories such as Alternative Spaces, Group or Collective, Gallery Spaces, Nightspots, Periodicals, Film/Video, Theater, and Other. In the spring of 2004, Franklin Furnace contributed this database to the Art Spaces Archives Project, an initiative founded by a consortium of alternative art organizations.

1999

October
THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE featured 50 performance artworks selected by Martha Wilson, which in her opinion had changed art discourse during the last quarter of the 20th century. Organized into 20 thematic shows—The Age of Avant-Garde Innocence, The Body as Art Medium, Endurance, Art in the Environment, Music as Art, Art History, Feminism, The World's a Stage, Art in the Age of AIDS, Gender Benders, Art and Madness, The Culture Wars I, The Culture Wars II, Monologue, Dis-Ability, Race, Art and Politics, Art/Life, The Extended Body, and Global Art—videos were edited, digitized, and streamed at ChannelP until the show was cancelled by Pseudo management. The program later became know as The Franklin Furnace Networked Digital Video Archive Prototype Project. Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. is indebted to Alice Wu, Alex Burke, Alex Walsh, Deborah Edmeades, and Heather Cassils for coordinating work with Pseudo.com. THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE section of Franklin Furnace's website was designed by Tiffany Ludwig.

August
Conceptual and Intermedia Arts Online (CIAO) and Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. welcomed the following new members to the consortium: The Tate Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Electronic Café International, Museu de Arte Contemporanea, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Performance Art Festival Archives, and Rhizome.org.

1998-1999

September-July
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.’s second netcasting season The Future of thePresent was presented on ChannelP via Pseudo.com.

1998

August
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. was invited to join the Conceptual and Intermedia Arts Online (CIAO) consortium. Franklin Furnace helped to develop vocabulary standards for cataloging avant-garde artworks and best practices for digitizing such materials to be made accessible online. CIAO is a collaborative project designed to create networked access to educational and scholarly material on the broad theme of conceptual and intermedia art. Members of the consortium include Berkley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, UC Berkeley; The Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts, University of Iowa; Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities; The Walker Art Center; and National Gallery of Canada.

March
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. moved to 45 John Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan.

January
Franklin Furnace at Pseudo Programs was the first netcasting season of ten artists presented in collaboration with Pseudo.com. Performances were netcast live from Pseudo's studios, and then archived on their servers for at least six months. Artists selected for this project included Halona Hilbertz, Bingo Gazingo, Patricia Hoffbauer, Jon Keith, Nora York, Jason E. Bowman, Kali Lela Colton, Anna Mosby Coleman, Lenora Champagne, and Alvin Eng with Yoav Gal. The program was later documented on CD-ROM and published in collaboration with Parsons School of Design. At the time, Pseudo Programs, Inc. was the world's largest producer of Internet television, broadcasting over 30 shows featuring emerging artists, news, and entertainment. The Pseudo Programs section on Franklin Furnace's website was designed by Yoon Hoe (Kelly) Gu.

1997

September
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. sold its TriBeCa loft space and established a Cash Reserve Account with the proceeds, which was matched by a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

February
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. launched its website as the organization’s Board determined that access to freedom of expression and a broader audience for emerging artists through an online presence would be Franklin Furnace’s prime focus for programing.

1996

October
IN THE FLOW: Alternate Authoring Strategies, the final exhibition at Franklin Furnace Archive Inc.’s Franklin Street loft space, marked the organization’s 20th anniversary. This exhibition brought together a selection of works that treated content as flowing information rather than property. IN THE FLOW was curated by Daniel Georges.

September-October
UBD JUDGE served as an online forum to freely discuss the content of Franklin Furnace Archive Inc.'s 20th Anniversary exhibition Voyeur's Delight. Organized by visual artists Babs Rhinegold and Grace Roselli, this exhibition explored sex as a legitimate subject for artistic inquiry. The UBD JUDGE forum on Franklin Furnace's website was designed by Betsy Gallagher.

1995

September
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. was awarded a Challenge Grant by the National Endowment for the Arts. Martha Wilson realized that Franklin Furnace would never be remembered for its renovated real estate, but for the importance of its programs, and that the Capital campaign was raising money for the wrong reasons.

1993

November
The Museum of Modern Art acquired Franklin Furnace Archive Inc.'s collection of artists' books published internationally after 1960, the largest collection in the United States at the time, to form the Museum of Modern Art Franklin Furnace Artist Book Collection.

October
Fluxus: A Conceptual Country curated by Estera Milman began its international exhibition tour at Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.

1992

June
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. presented Too Shocking To Show at the Brooklyn Museum, which included performances by Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, Sapphire, and Scarlet O. The event included introductory remarks by Robert T. Buck, and Carole S. Vance.

May
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. purchased an historic Italianate loft in TriBeCa with proceeds from a 15th Anniversary Art Sale mounted at Marian Goodman Gallery.

January
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.’s Visual Artists Organizations grant from the National Endowment for the Arts was rescinded by the National Council. The grant was rescinded from the organization because of the sexually explicit content featured in a performance by Scarlet O. The Peter Norton Family Foundation replaced this financial loss with a $25,000 grant to Franklin Furnace.

1991

October
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.’s Board of Directors decided to transfer the organization’s collecting, cataloguing, and conservation responsibilities to another public institution in order to preserve the legacy of the field it helped to create.

1990-1991

September-June
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. presented its first performance season in exile at the Judson Memorial Church following the closure of Franklin Furnace’s space in Downtown Manhattan.

 1990

July
As the culture wars began in the United States, Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. held Franklin Furnace Fights for First Amendment Rights at The Public Theater. The line up featured an all-star cast of artists including Eric Bogosian, Cee Scott Brown, Karen Finley, Allan Ginsburg, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, The Guerrilla Girls, Frank Maya, Pauline Oliveros, IONE, Nicky Paraiso, Jessica Hagedorn, RENO, Annie Sprinkle, Lynne Tillman, Diane Torr, and Jawole Willa Jo Zolar.

June
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. presented Karen Finley's exhibition, A Woman's Life Isn't Worth Much (1990). After presenting this exhibition, Franklin Furnace was subjected to inquiries and audits by the Internal Revenue Service, the State Comptroller of New York, and the General Accounting Office.

May
The New York City Fire Department closed Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.'s performance space on Franklin Street in response to a call claiming the organization was an "illegal social club."

April
Governor Mario Cuomo cut half the budget of New York State Council for the Arts and Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.'s funding drops from $144,000 to $40,000 in one year’s time.

1989

February
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. presented The Avant-Garde Book: 1900-1945, which featured rarely seen Eastern European avant-garde works. The exhibition was accompanied by John Wilson's troupe reenactments of Dada performances. These performances were part of a benefit to support Franklin Furnace.

1988

February
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. and Thought Music produced Teenytown, a multimedia performance by Jessica Hagedorn, Laurie Carlos, and Robbie McCauley. It included a film by John Woo and featured choreography by Jawole Willa Jo Zolar. Teenytown examined how racism is embedded in popular culture and entertainment.

1987

October
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. celebrated Marcel Duchamp's 100th birthday with the performance art extravaganza, The Avant-Garde Breaks Into Midtown, which also served as the inauguration of the Equitable Center's new auditorium.

February
Pop artist Andy Warhol died after serving on Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.'s Board of Directors for 21 days.

1986

June
Hosted by Lily Tomlin, Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. celebrated its 10th anniversary by granting Arties Awards to Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Eric Bogosian, Richard Foreman, Tehching Hsieh, Linda Montano, Allan Kaprow, The Kipper Kids, Lydia Lunch, Lisa Lyon, The Mastfor II Co, Leo Lionni, F. T. Marinetti, Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Pat Oleszko, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, Michael Smith, Redy Story, William Wegman, Man Ray, and Paul Zaloom.

1985

September
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. initiated the Sequential Art for Kids education program, placing professional artist bookmakers, performers, photographers, filmmakers, animators, and videographers in New York City public schools.

May
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. created the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, providing funds to emerging artists to produce new works in New York City. Franklin Furnace’s peer-reviewed panel selected three of the "NEA Four" artists—Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, and John Fleck—along with other highly charged political artists Papo Colo, Kaylynn Two Trees Sullivan, William Pope.L, Jennifer Miller, Andrea Fraser, Peggy Pettitt, Kim Irwin, Keith Antar Mason, Murray Hill, Pamela Sneed, Tanya Barfield, Deborah Edmeades, Patty Chang, and Stanya Kahn. The Franklin Furnace Fund was supported by the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation. 

1984

February
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. was reprimanded by the National Endowment for the Arts and dropped by several corporate sources for presenting Carnival Knowledge—an exhibition and performance that questioned if there can be such a thing as "feminist pornography." Sex worker Annie Sprinkle made her debut as an artist during the performance Deep Inside Porn Stars.

October
The exhibition Cubist Prints/Cubist Books began its national tour at Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. and later traveled to the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Center for the Fine Arts, Miami; Marian Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; and Galerie Berggruen, Paris.

1983

August
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. was awarded an Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to promote institutional stability through development and publicity plans.

1981

February
Eric Bogosian’s first performance of Men Inside in New York City was presented by Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.

1979-1980

September-June
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. began its commitment to presenting the historical antecedents of contemporary artists' books with the exhibition Page as Alternative Space (1909-1980). This exhibition was curated by Clive Phillpot, Charles Henri Ford, Jon Hendricks, Barbara Moore, and Ingrid Sischy, inaugurated movement.

1979

June
Weston J. Naef and Martha Wilson selected works for the exhibition In the Shadow of Duchamp: The Photomechanical Revolution and the Artist's Book at the Grolier Club in New York.

1976

September
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. received funding from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts for its programing.

April
Martha Wilson founded Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. to serve artists who used publishing as a democratic artistic medium and to assist artists who were not being supported by existing art organizations.