Serving as an interface among University of Iowa facilities–the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, the University Libraries, and a number of academic units–Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts (ATCA) is committed to the collection and preservation of works and papers of contemporary artists and to the facilitation and dissemination of research related to the post-World War II avant-garde. The project was founded by Estera Milman in 1982, and Milman acted as its director until her departure from the University in 2000. Composed of a complex body of contemporary artifacts and documentation spanning such phenomena as Fluxus, event arts and happenings, book works and visual poetry, artists’ video, correspondence art, conceptual art, performance relics, and artists’ papers, the collection is similar in kind to holdings housed at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.