Michigan State University Libraries Special Collections is pleased to announce the opening of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival records.
The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival was an annual international music festival for women by women. In 1976, Lisa Vogel, sister Kristie Vogel, and Mary Kindig organized a women-only event in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan where approximately 2,000 women congregated for a three-day music festival from August 20 to 22. From 1976 to 1981 the festival took place in a wooded area near Hesperia, Michigan, during which time the festival grew from a regional to a national event. In 1982, the festival moved near Hart, Michigan, to 650 acres of private land where each year women assembled tents, built stages, and delivered a variety of services and workshops at the space called "The Land." This would be its official location until its discontinuation in 2015.
The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival records were donated to MSU Libraries Special Collections by Lisa Vogel, producer and one of the festival’s original founders. The collection consists of approximately 96 linear feet in 81 boxes, and contains crew guides and handbooks, inventories, maps, wooden signs, banners, t-shirts, programs, brochures, posters, meeting minutes, correspondence, as well as press clippings and reviews about the festival.
The finding aid for the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival records is available online: http://as.lib.msu.edu/repositories/2/resources/1983
For more information about this collection and others at MSU Special Collections, please visit https://lib.msu.edu/spc/.
This story was originally published in the spring 2018 issue of the Society of American Archivist's Manuscript Repositories newsletter.
