Passionate About History and the Making of History: in Situ Dialogues with Artists and their Assistants about Studio Archives
1. Passionate About History
and the Making of
History: in situ dialogues
with artists and their
assistants about studio
archives
Heather Gendron, Art Librarian - UNC Chapel Hill hgendron@email.unc.edu
2. WE
ARTISTS’ STUDIO ARCHIVES
Funded by:
Artist Support Partners Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation
H.W. Wilson Foundation Research Award, Art Libraries Society of North America
UNC Chapel Hill – University Research Council, Faculty Small Grant
3. STUDIO ARCHIVES help artists:
• increase the visibility of their
work (get it in shows, have it
written about and researched)
• sell their work to collectors and
museums, get grants, and
manage their fiscal operations
• manage their legal rights and
estate
• create new works
• and ultimately maintain control
over their image as an artist and
their legacy.
4. STUDIO ARCHIVES publication:
• Benefits of organizing & preserving
• Figuring out what you gave &
deciding what to keep
• Studio archives assistants (hiring,
managing, etc.)
• Managing the artwork (physical &
digital)
• Managing and preserving digital
content (e.g., digital images &
video, audio, email, websites,
documents, etc.)
• Databases
• Working with institutional archives
& museums
• Estate planning
Case
studies
Forms &
Worksheets
9. Mel Chin
“With conceptual work there's a lot of
paper, a lot of digital files, a lot of
research…and the artwork is a huge part
of it…"
Rose Candelara, Archives Assistant
10. Cai Guo Qiang
“fireworks” & “explosion events”
Closing Rainbow: Fireworks Project for the
Closing Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic
Games
Beijing, China
2008
Fallen Blossoms: Explosion Project
Philadelphia Museum of Art
2009
14. STUDIO ARCHIVES
THE (ART)WORK
THE DOCUMENTATION OF/ABOUT THE (ART)WORK
INSPIRATIONAL & SOURCE MATERIALS
• Artwork inventories & databases (image & video libraries, sales
records, preservation records, exhibition history, etc.)
• Artist statements, CVs, websites
• Financial and artwork sales records
• Correspondence – personal and with “art world” people
(collectors, gallery owners, museum staff, art critics & historians,
etc.)
• Recorded interviews, presentations, materials from courses taught
• Personal & studio libraries
• Exhibition catalogs and announcements
• Source materials (e.g., unedited video used or to be used in final
works)
• Sketchbooks
• Artwork not yet sold
• Collections of artwork by other artists
15. STUDIO ARCHIVES
Right now it feels like the word “archive” seems a lot
bigger than my practice so far…This is a great thing for
me to be talking about because it’s not something that
I think about in an extended way. I do my process of
creating a digital file and put everything in it…then I go
to the next project and that’s it.
-early career artist (A)
It’s hard for me to apply that word [archive] to myself. I
have my computer and my hard drives and I guess
that’s my archive. It depends on if it’s my work or other
things that led up to the work because then it goes a lot
deeper….There’s a lot of flow between my life and my
work.”
-early career artist (B)
16. STUDIO ARCHIVES databases
Main Sections
Artworks
CV
Bibliography
Documentation
Acquisitions
Conservation Log
Registrar Log
Video
Artwork Entry
Title
Date
Material(s)
Location
Exhibit
Collaborator(s)
Dimensions
Work type (installation,
drawing, etc.)
21. STUDIO ARCHIVES digital/video
storage & preservation
I also didn't know how to go
through them [artworks on video]
and what to eliminate because
formats keep changing so much
that I have no idea and I try to ask
people and I've gotten nowhere...I
have 3/4 inch tapes that most of
the work was done on for a period
of 15 years...They're cluttering up
the whole back [area] there...a
space...that used to be my edit(ing)
room and now it's just a storage
room.
- late career artist
22. READINGS - current favorites
Artists' estates : Reputations in trust, ed. Magda
Salvesen. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
2005.
The Artist Interview for Conservation and
:
Presentation of Contemporary Art, Guidelines and
Practice. Lydia Beerkens , et al. Heyningen: Jap Sam
Books, 2012.
Artists’ records in the archives : Symposium
proceedings / New York, NY. Archivists Round Table of
Metropolitan New York (2013) – available online
Full bibliography available upon request.
23. Why artists keep studio archives…
1. Business needs and goals.
2. To develop and promote artist’s work.
3. Legacy & estate planning.
Challenges…
Time, money, and/or skills.
In order to define what studio archives are, we should first look at some of the work artists are doing – then you’ll start to see what the challenges are. Contemporary artists enjoy a great deal of freedom in terms of the materials and methods they can use to create new works. The work may be a performance, it may be conceptual and ephemeral, the work may be something that needs to be re-created or re-built each time it is exhibited. Artists may need to include a lot of documentation on hand in order to re-create works at different venues. Without documentation, it is simply not possible to promote or make a living from the work. The other thing to know is that no one else does this for artists. They have to manage it themselves. If they can’t do it all themselves, and if they have the resources, they hire people to help. Galleries do not provide full archival services – not even close.