FOR ARTIST FOUNDATIONS & ESTATES
Most artist-endowed foundations run on a board, a trustee, and one or two people who know where everything is. The oeuvre is large, the records are paper, and the catalogue raisonné everyone agrees is needed has always cost too much. We begin where you actually are, which is often before any system exists.
WHAT YOU ARE CARRYING
The obligations of a private operating foundation with the staff of a household. Stewardship of the works themselves: storage, conservation, appraisal, loans. Rights and reproduction requests from publishers and researchers. Correspondence, photographs, and studio records that only one person can navigate. The 990-PF, the five percent, the disqualified-person rules. And the catalogue raisonné, which every serious foundation needs and few can afford.
WHAT WE HEAR
The material is there: letters, photographs, invoices, exhibition files. Processing it is detective work, and there is no archivist on staff. The first step is a collections record, so the archive exists as something other than boxes.
The trustee who knew the artist. The assistant who filed everything. When they are away, the foundation stops. We write it down, put it in systems the next person can run, and make sure no one is the only one who knows.
Traditional catalogue projects assume a research team and millions of dollars. The Labs exist to change that arithmetic, while the foundation’s scholars keep every judgment about inclusion, attribution, and authenticity.
WHERE WE BEGIN
For a foundation without systems, the first project is establishing them: a collections record, a documented archive, a place records live that is not a drawer. When the collection exists as data, the catalogue research can begin.
Short, because the terrain is small and undocumented. Where the records are, who holds them, what the foundation is obliged to keep, and what to establish first.
A collections record. Collector and donor records. A website the foundation controls. A log for rights and reproduction requests. Connected, and documented for whoever comes next.
Machines search, transcribe, match, and reconstruct. The foundation’s scholars decide. Our founding laboratory is an artist-endowed foundation.
INDEPENDENCE
Artist-endowed foundations live under rules about self-dealing, private benefit, and insider-owned works. Everything we set up keeps authority, data, and scholarly decisions with the foundation, and nothing we build depends on us. Money can support research. Money can never buy inclusion or attribution.
HOW WE BUILD
Everything we set up assumes you will grow. Five people today, fifty in a few years: the tools, the permissions, the data, the costs are chosen so that nothing has to be torn out and rebuilt on the way up.
Tools, permissions, and data that hold at five people and at fifty.
The most capable option inside what you can carry, not the most expensive one.
Current, well-supported technology only. Nothing that is old in three years.
Nothing switched off until the old record and the new one agree.
We work the way we advise. Systems we supervise carry the searching, drafting, testing, and documenting; people who know the field review every decision. A practice this size can therefore take on this scope, and keep its price within reach of a nonprofit.
START HERE
Book a first conversation. It costs nothing.