Because every artist's studio archive looks and functions differently, the term "studio archive" can seem murky. But once it's defined, you'll see how you already have one by default.
So what is it?
An archive, at its most simplistic, is a collection of documents and objects relating to a person or entity that provide context for how they lived their lives or managed its affairs. To complicate matters a smidge, an archive is not just the 'stuff' itself, but also how that stuff is arranged. How the materials are ordered—whether deliberately, through happenstance, due to benign neglect, or some combination thereof—is also an artifact of the person or entity, serving as testament to how they or it thought of or approached those materials. To define a studio archive (aka an artist's archive), we essentially just get more specific. An artists' studio archive is the accretion of materials relating to an artist's practice and career. Archivists and curators regularly squabble over whether the artworks themselves and any candid photographs that happen to be snapped by a photographer of note count as part of an artist's archive. You will have to make that determination for yourself. What an artist needs from their archive changes over their career, so what they include in their archive will also change over time.
Sometimes artists choose to extend the scope of their archive to include life outside of their career. If an artist didn't deliberately destroy everything documenting their personal life prior to dying, then typically the person handling their estate or scholars/curators will automatically lump their life in with their practice. For better or worse, extra-career matters don't usually sneak their way deliberately into an artist's studio archive until they're thinking about post-career legacy.
Tangent:
If you've taken an art history class covering Western art from the Renaissance forward, you've likely seen this phenomenon in action by the way that cannon is presented, typically in the form of the Cult of the Artist started (again, according to the cannon) by Vasari, reinvigorated in a big way around the Impressionists, in its heyday with the modernist boy's club of the 1920s through '40s, and transitioning into an emphasis on the midcentury AbEx boys. No matter how you feel about the various art historical lenses that have contributed to and critiqued the supremacy of considering an artist when considering their art, I would argue that it's impossible to say that there's no value in considering art within its multiple contexts—of its immediate creation, its creator, and the environment in which it was produced and received (but then I'm both an archivist and a social art historian, so I'm biased). /tangent.
Yeah, but what actually goes into a studio archive?
The best way to answer this question is with an anatomy lesson. This is a non exhaustive list of all the typical bits. An archive does not need all of these components at once to be considered a studio archive. As previously mentioned, they tend to be pretty fluid, shifting to include the elements that best serve the need of the artist at that point in their career.
Firstly, the physical:
1. Artwork in its final form*
2. Drafts of and planning for artwork
a. Journals & sketchbooks
b. Idea boards
3. Physical portfolio (largely a thing of the past, but maybe you're retro)
4. Bills, receipts, legal & business papers
5. Articles, magazines, exhibition catalogues
a. about you,
b. that you've written, or
c. that inspires your thinking about your work
6. Materials that you use in making your art (eg your media and tools)
7. Photos, cassettes, slides, CDs, DVDs related to your practice
8. Other forms of storage for non-tangible materials (eg laptop, external hard drive, thumb drive)**
9. Letters, postcards, memorabilia
10. Calendar
11. Reference books and materials
12. Hard copies of digital materials
* Assuming here that these artworks and drafts and such are tangible objects, not digital ones.
** This is a squidgy category. In this instance, I'm talking about the physical object on which you store your digital materials, not the digital materials contained within those storage objects.
Secondly, the digital
1. Artwork in its final form* and physical artwork documentation (eg .jpg or .mp4)
2. Artwork inventory
3. Drafts of and planning for artwork
4. Digital portfolio
5. Bills, receipts, legal & business papers
6. Articles, exhibition catalogues, etc.
a. about you,
b. that you've written
7. Drafts of resume, lesson plans, artist's talks & presentations
8. Grant/fellowship/residency applications
9. Calendar
10. Email, social media & website
11. Digital surrogates of physical materials
12. Reference articles, ebooks & media that inspire your work
13. Materials saved to the cloud
14. Everything saved on your computer and and external digital storage
* Assuming here that these artworks and drafts and such are digital objects, not physical ones.
Why you already have an archive, even if it's not on purpose
Now that we have a shared understanding of a studio archive, I'm guessing that you're already ahead of me on this one. Whether you keep them organized or not, I bet you have most of these materials kicking around your computer, studio, and storage areas. This is where we start talking about your archive as both a container, as well as the stuff in it.
If you have these materials haphazard all over the place, then that's how you've chosen to organize your archive. If they're partially organized, that's how you've chosen to organize your archive. If you have a place for everything and actually keep everything in that place regularly, then that's how you've chosen to organize your archive. Each of these approaches is perfectly valid, as long as the system is working for you. There are even terms for each of these approaches: piling, spring cleaning, and filing. (We'll cover these in depth in a future post). So, as long as you are keeping any or all of the materials covered in our anatomy lesson, then you already have an archive, and you already have a system in place for how you approach those materials.
If the system isn't working for you, then it can seem out of control that you feel like you don't have one. The out-of-control- feeling can be addressed by changing your approach to make your archive work for you. And that, in the end, is the point of your archive; it's a tool meant to make your professional life easier. In future posts, we'll cover strategies for what combination of approaches might work best for you, as well as what materials might be most useful for you to keep.
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