Rainbow: The Roy G BIv Archive
Rainbow: The Roy G BIV Archive
Rainbow: The Roy G BIV Archive is an evolving archival, curatorial, and creative research project developed by artist and author Spencer Sheehan-Kalina. Beginning with the rainbow as a symbol of LGBTQ+ community, identity, visibility, resistance, and celebration, the project has grown into a broader investigation into the ways histories, cultures, communities, objects, artworks, documents, memories, and lived experiences can be collected, preserved, studied, interpreted, and shared.
The archive is conceived as a living repository rather than a static collection. Its scope encompasses LGBTQ+ history and culture in the broadest possible sense while also creating space for the personal, artistic, familial, and community histories that intersect with the development of Spencer's creative practice.
At its heart, Rainbow: The Roy G BIV Archive is concerned with the preservation of cultural memory.
It is an archive of people, objects, stories, images, documents, artworks, ideas, and experiences. It is interested in the extraordinary and the ordinary, the historically significant and the seemingly insignificant, the publicly documented and the privately remembered.
The rainbow serves as both a symbol and a conceptual framework. Its colours suggest plurality without requiring uniformity; distinct elements can exist alongside one another while forming part of a larger whole. In this sense, the rainbow provides an appropriate metaphor for an archive concerned with the many overlapping histories and experiences that make up individual and collective cultural life.
LGBTQ+ Cultural Archive
A central and foundational component of Rainbow: The Roy G BIV Archive is its commitment to preserving LGBTQ+ life, history, culture, creativity, and material heritage.
The archive encompasses LGBTQ+ experience in its broadest possible context. Its potential holdings include art and photography, literature and poetry, correspondence and diaries, newspapers and magazines, posters and flyers, political and activist materials, clothing and fashion, domestic objects, personal memorabilia, publications, recordings, oral histories, Pride ephemera, documentation of LGBTQ+ spaces and gatherings, digital culture, and other traces of LGBTQ+ lives and communities.
The archive is interested not only in major historical events and prominent figures, but in the ordinary evidence of queer life.
A photograph from a Pride celebration, a handwritten letter between lovers, a community newsletter, an artist's work, a nightclub flyer, a political poster, an item of clothing, a domestic object, a diary entry, or an anonymous piece of ephemera may all contribute to the understanding of LGBTQ+ history.
The archive therefore does not attempt to construct one authoritative narrative of LGBTQ+ experience. Instead, it seeks to preserve a constellation of different experiences, perspectives, identities, communities, and histories.
The rainbow remains a point of departure, but the archive recognizes that LGBTQ+ life has never been reducible to a single symbol.
Hankal Fonds
Hankal Fonds is a major personal and artist-centered collection within Rainbow: The Roy G BIV Archive.
Hankal Archive Project is a creative-based research project and repository through which Spencer Sheehan-Kalina preserves and studies objects, documents, artworks, photographs, writings, knowledge, ephemera, and other materials relating to himself, his family, the communities with which he has engaged, and the cultural environments that have informed his creative practice.
The inclusion of the Hankal Fonds within Rainbow reflects an understanding that personal history and cultural history are rarely separate.
An artist does not create in isolation. Creative practice emerges through relationships, families, friendships, communities, places, cultural movements, personal experiences, encounters, and accumulated knowledge.
Consequently, the Hankal Fonds documents not only the things Spencer has made, but also the world surrounding their making.
It may encompass personal papers, family materials, photographs, correspondence, journals, manuscripts, artworks, books, collected objects, research materials, ephemera, digital records, and other evidence of personal and creative life.
Some of these materials may relate directly to LGBTQ+ history and experience; others may be more broadly personal, familial, artistic, or cultural. Their inclusion reflects the larger philosophy of Rainbow: The Roy G BIV Archive—that cultural memory is made up of overlapping histories rather than isolated categories.
In this context, Hankal Archive Project becomes a microhistory within the larger archive: a record of one artist and the people, places, objects, communities, and experiences that have shaped his creative life.
At the end of 2024, the Hankal Archive Project established a public digital presence through a dedicated blog, providing a space for research, documentation, and public awareness of the repository developed by Spencer in pursuit of his creative practice.
Chasing Rainbows
Chasing Rainbows is an ongoing series of artworks created by Spencer Sheehan-Kalina through the creative research undertaken in the development of the Rainbow Archive.
The works emerge from encounters with archival material, LGBTQ+ histories, cultural symbols, objects, images, and ideas.
Rather than functioning as illustrations of the archive, these artworks represent a creative response to archival research. They allow historical and collected materials to be translated into another form, creating a reciprocal relationship between archival practice and artistic production.
Research generates artwork, while artwork generates new questions for research.
Chasing Rainbows therefore occupies the space between archive, research, interpretation, and contemporary art.
Collating Colours
Collating Colours is the research, programming, and public-facing dimension of Rainbow: The Roy G BIV Archive.
Beginning in 2025, the project developed several approaches for continuing to develop and share its repository, including a creative-research laboratory, digital holding space, public reading room, and exhibition program.
Collating Colours reflects the idea that an archive is not simply a place where objects are stored. To archive is also to arrange, compare, contextualize, interpret, and discover relationships between materials.
Through this program, archival holdings can become starting points for exhibitions, research, public conversations, writing, artistic experimentation, educational initiatives, and further collecting.
A Living Archive
Rainbow: The Roy G BIV Archive is conceived as a living archive.
Its holdings are not intended to remain fixed. New objects and documents may enter the collection. Existing materials may be reconsidered through new research. Personal histories may reveal connections to wider cultural histories. Contemporary materials may eventually become historical documents in their own right.
The archive therefore exists simultaneously in the past, present, and future.
It preserves what has already happened while documenting what is happening now and creating a framework through which future generations may encounter these materials.
Its digital holding spaces provide public points of access to this continuing work. The Rainbow Archive's digital presence, established in 2025, provides a place for research, documentation, writing, collected materials, and ongoing developments within the project.
Archive as Artistic Practice
At its broadest, Rainbow: The Roy G BIV Archive understands archiving itself as a creative practice.
Collecting is an act of looking.
Preservation is an act of care.
Research is an act of attention.
Cataloguing is an act of interpretation.
Exhibition is an act of storytelling.
And artistic response is another way of keeping an archive alive.
The boundaries between artist, archivist, curator, researcher, collector, and participant are therefore intentionally fluid.
Rainbow: The Roy G BIV Archive does not seek to establish a definitive collection. It seeks instead to create relationships between materials—to allow objects, images, documents, artworks, memories, and histories to speak to one another.
Many Colours, Many Histories
The title Rainbow: The Roy G BIV Archive ultimately refers to more than the colours of the visible spectrum.
It represents an approach to cultural memory in which difference is not something to be resolved into a single narrative.
Each colour remains distinct.
Each history retains its particularity.
Yet together they form something larger.
Through its LGBTQ+ collections, the Hankal Archive Project, Chasing Rainbows, Collating Colours, exhibitions, creative research, digital publications, and future archival initiatives, Rainbow: The Roy G BIV Archive continues to explore the relationships between personal history and collective history, art and documentation, memory and material culture, research and making.
The archive is therefore not simply a repository of LGBTQ+ history, nor solely an archive of one artist's life.
It is an evolving constellation of cultural memory.
Rainbow: The Roy G BIV Archive is a place for gathering the colours of lived experience—preserving what might otherwise disappear, studying what has been overlooked, and creating new ways of seeing the histories that surround us.