Four ways that your archives can make being a career artist easier.
How can your studio archive help you and your career as a professional artist, maker, or craftsperson? Below, I break it down into four main categories that apply to most of us dependent on creativity for a living.
1. Expand your artistic flow & potential subject matter
Perhaps most importantly for a working artist, maintaining a studio archive expands your capacity for your artistic flow and development. Your flow is less likely to experience unhelpful interruptions if you can find what you need with greater ease, as well as switch between projects more smoothly if you—like many of us—have multiple projects demanding your attention at any given moment. If you've asked yourself the questions Where? When? How? when in the middle of a work, then establishing an order to your materials and documentation can help you. For instance, where did I save those files from my architect? When did I do that site visit to the park where I'm installing this sculpture? How did I solve the issue of preventing iron rusting last time I had a welding project? Establishing and even loosely maintaining your archive can address all of your where, when, and how questions as you work on current projects.
But it also can enrich your future work in one of two ways. Firstly, having documentation of themes and issues you've been thinking through over time opens up space to develop and progress through series that you might otherwise not have consciously pursued in your work. For instance, say natural geometry is something that you found compelling even before you started your career as a professional artists. By having old notebooks and sketchbooks to flip through, a master portfolio of all of your work since childhood to occasionally scroll through, and boxes of the things you collected and kept since your school days to reference, you can take a bird's eye view of your artistic life and make a conscious effort to build a map out of those apparently unrelated rambles you've taken over time. And if you want to get more practical rather than philosophical about how maintaining your archive can add to your future work, you could easily draw from at least semi-organized folders of old reference photos, thought boards, and planning for future projects you didn't have the time or money for in the past.
Secondly, keeping a moderately organized archive of your artwork, career, and/or family provides a source from which you can directly mine for inspiration in future work. Artist Wendy Red Star provides powerful examples for how engaging with and incorporating archival materials into your work can create conversation and connection that otherwise might have gone unaddressed in a public way. It can allow you to construct or comment on legacy. Preserving your archive for future scholars, artists, and museum-goers is valuable in and of itself. But interacting with your archive in your work to deliberately comment on that archive makes it all the more powerful, and potentially of even more interest to repositories—like galleries, libraries, academic institutions, and museums—that might have a future interest in helping you maintain your legacy as you reach the latter stage of your career.
2. Ease the economic strain of being a career artist
Let's be real. Funding is the hurdle most of us struggle to clear as full or part time artists, makers, and creatives. Maintaining your studio archive is a tool to help you overcome that obstacle from month to month. and year to year. How?, you ask. The answer is twofold:
A. Streamlining grant, fellowship, and residency applications is a big way that your archive can keep you working with the lights on. By having a go-to storage spot for (1) the writings you've produced about previous work, (2) their associated edited images and media, (3) your artist's statements addressing the broader scope of your (5) growing portfolio (that you've definitely been conscientious about keeping up to date), (6) your resume of shows and awards, and (7) any essays you've written for previous applications, it's simple as pie to recycle and tweak what you have previously done to fit your current application's needs. No more starting from scratch because you can't find this file or that document. The less time and effort these applications suck out of you, the more time and energy you have left for your actual practice, and the more applications you can complete on time.
B. Maintaining your documentation can ease the burden and stress of tax season, along with ensuring that you're covered in terms of liability, legalities, and insurance. Should any sort of disaster strike—whether it be natural, intellectual property theft related, or due to other legal matters—you can proceed knowing that you're covered as best as you can be. Having a consistent, secure place for contracts, grant agreements, and financial documents means you can double check any language as needed and keep up with all the paperwork you need to make sure that you don't end up owing the government or your financiers beaucoup bucks. (Side note: if you need help understanding W-2s, W-4s, 1099s,1040s, Schedule Cs, and other state or federal tax documents, ask your local public librarian for help. They won't fill the forms out for you, but they can help demystify them. If you want a quick Cliff Notes version of the definitions for each of these documents, check out this post [add link once website is live and the blog post has a link]).
3. Facilitate outreach
Outreach is a significant tool that goes criminally underutilized. Building outreach—typically through programming—into your practice, as well as your grants, fellowships and residencies enables you to reach and become relevant to a wider audience. And from a mercenary perspective, having programming outreach on your resume makes you even more appealing when applying for future grants, fellowships, and residencies. Especially if you have the trifecta of numbers, photographs, and visitor narratives to report. And as someone who has done a good bit of program planning, once you have something of a system down for the primary types of outreach you provide, you can use that framework to quickly whip up future program planning. However—and this is where your studio archive comes in—that framework only works if you either have a prodigious memory or you have easily accessible documentation of your previous planning. Perhaps you even go so far as to keep a template for some of your planning purposes to really streamline the process.
On top of that, having your studio archive in order (particularly your previous works, documentation of your work, previous programming or community engagement, and awards) lets you reach out to institutions that can allow your work to be seen and engaged with in a setting relevant to your local practice, your past, and your communities. Which also includes the the potential for free, climate-controlled storage for your archive as a not-to-fringe benefit. For instance, Cornelio Campos was able to donate both his archive and his previous work to Durham Public Library's North Carolina Collection for long term preservation and use by the community with the stipulation that he could remove materials as needed for his work and for his shows. (For more details on how Campos arrived at this arrangement and its significance, check out this blog post from Colin Post). Students and researchers can now find and access materials related to Campos' career, particularly documentation and ephemera (eg fliers, announcements, and some exhibition catalogues). The librarians can now use his work and archive for displays and events to excite interest from library visitors and to help tell the ongoing story of the art community in Durham. Campos' legacy in that narrative is now ensured as a result of having performed past outreach within the community, which was documented in his archive, he deliberately developed an archive of his larger career, and he forged a connection with an institution relevant to him and his local community for outreach, preservation, and legacy. And as Colin Post—Campos' archival assistant through the process—noted in the previously linked blog post, Campos found the process of putting together his studio archive empowering and enriching. Discovering how much interest a local institution had in the documentation of his career was further uplifting and validating. We all have the potential to be so lucky by taking the time to regularly maintain our studio archives so to use it as an outreach tool.
4. Ensure your legacy
This brings us naturally to the the idea of your archive as your most powerful legacy tool. It ensures that your life, work, and career are preserved for the future. By putting in place habits of documentation and the organization of that documentation in a manner that protects it from natural and digital disaster, you are able to curate what about your process, your work, and your experience survives. And if you're proactive, you can use that archive to build relationships while you're still working. People—gallerists, curators, and scholars included alongside your public—love a glimpse behind the curtain. That human aspect connects viewers to your work in a profound way. Don't underestimate the value humanization can play in your career. Curators certainly don't. Think of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, where visitors from all over the world flock to examples of book inscriptions from O'Keeffe's library, letters between her and her contemporaries, the painter's toolbox she took with her on hikes out to painting locations, or the livestream of the garden still tended behind her desert house miles north of the museum. Or the Clyfford Still Museum, where letters and sketches and early drafts are heavily featured and where his library is physically and digitally preserved and frequently accessed. People now and in the future genuinely crave to know the figure behind the work. Your studio archive makes that possible.
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