Creating a Living Legacy: Blane De St. Croix

Can you share what has changed for you as a result of being a part of the CALL program?
The CALL program has had a profound effect on the archiving method I use to organize my artwork documentation, provenance, inventory, press, published material and art related correspondences. It has provided order where there was none and has made information much more easily accessible. I now have a functioning system in place to continue my works archiving process.

The CALL program archives is now my main go to informational resource. Whether I access it for creating or updating my website, providing documentation for galleries or curators, and now it will greatly assist with the future publishing of my upcoming extensive catalogue and my largest exhibition to date. This valuable tool has allowed me to cross reference work with other projects, easily locate appropriate press and published materials and maintain a safe place to contain all master images of my entire body of work.

Can you give us a sense of what needed to be accomplished when you started working with the CALL program?

• All of my digital images needed to be organized, sorted and labeled properly.

• My works provenances needed to be established and recorded.

• All of my artworks were not correctly inventoried and did not have corresponding numbering.

• All press and published material on my work was in need of accurately being archived and labeled.

Note: All this organization has made all my artwork data easily accessible and manageable.

What has been the most rewarding aspect of this work?

• All my artwork’s data is now safe and permanently protected in the CALL database.

• All my artwork has been inventoried and its data stored.

• All my artwork is now easy to access – images, press and supporting material.

• All my artwork can now be easily updated in a streamlined manner and to be accessed by other arts professionals I work with.

What has been most difficult?
Starting the process! It was daunting but the CALL program archivist staff calmed my nerves and got me organized. It was also a bit of a learning curve in establishing how to personalize the data storage system to my own artwork, process, research and published materials.

What do you recommend to artists who might be in the early stages of creating an inventorying system?
Map out a clear objective plan of what is the most important work and establish a starting point. I prioritized my most recent seven years to be the first to archive. Later I expanded to the earlier years. It made it possible to manage what seemed a overwhelming undertaking.

Additionally, it is important to establish weekly (or at minimum a monthly) tasks to keep the database organized and updated regularly.