Tag Archives: artist

Preserving a Creative Legacy: How CARTA is Safeguarding Artists’ Websites

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Artists today use their websites as more than a business card– they are an online portfolio, CV, document of artistic evolution, and works of art in their own right. They are valuable records of a life’s work, yet as with all technology, they are fragile and ephemeral. They can vanish overnight due to expiring domain registrations, server migrations, software obsolescence, or administrative access loss after the passing of an artist. 

Art historians, critics, curators, and humanities scholars rely on artists’ records to understand and contextualize contemporary artistic practice. To support the accessibility and discoverability of these websites for art historical scholarship in the future, the Internet Archive’s Collaborative ART Archive (CARTA) program is working to preserve artists’ websites, ensuring that they endure as documents of an artist’s legacy. Earlier this year, CARTA led an initiative to expand the Artists’ Websites collection and to preserve underrepresented voices of artists that are at risk of disappearing from the digital cultural record. Through extensive outreach to artists and arts organizations, CARTA invited the public to nominate websites to grow the collection, including encouraging artists to submit their own websites for preservation. 

CARTA brings together art libraries, museums, and organizations from across the United States and Canada in partnership with the Internet Archive to preserve online art materials and make them permanently accessible to everyone. After an art resource is nominated by a CARTA member, web archivists take an interactive snapshot of the website to ensure the site is available in the future as it appeared on the day it was preserved. 

The librarians and archivists in the CARTA program have been championing access and preservation of artists’ websites since 2018. Members from Atlanta, Georgia to Vancouver, British Columbia have been nominating and curating websites of local artists and arts organizations that represent their diverse communities. The Getty Research Institute, for instance, nominates websites of Southern California artists and art organizations like the website of Ricardo Valverde, a Chicano photographer specializing in street photography and portraiture. He dedicated himself to photographing people, places, and events in East Los Angeles, offering a powerful counternarrative of his community and its inhabitants. In DC, the National Gallery of Art prioritizes Black artists like Tim Davis, a mixed-media painter working primarily with narratives of social justice, activism, identity, and the Black experience.

Tim Davis, Together As One, Silkscreen print, 2017

The recent public nomination call built on this longstanding preservation work by inviting artists and art organizations to contribute to the archive, and the response demonstrated just how meaningful this is for artists. One artist who submitted a website for preservation shared: “I fear this website was built long ago and may soon be nonfunctional.”

Another referenced a former technological loss: “We had a website melt down some years ago and lost everything.”

Another artist shared the personal significance of the call to archive: “This could not come at a better time as I start to work on my artist legacy and I’m thinking of ways that my website can live on once I pass and won’t be able to pay the fees after a while.  My website is an extremely important tool that I have used since 2005 when it was uploaded. It is a tool that I use daily and share with others, and helps me track my works, my exhibition history, my entire art career.  As a mid-career LatinX artist and under represented, […] it will give me peace of mind that future generations could find my work as I designed and intend the public to view it.”

Over 50 websites were selected for preservation from this public nomination process and will be archived in the upcoming weeks. Of the sites that were reviewed and recommended by CARTA’s Collection Development Committee members, many websites of Latinx artists were prioritized, showcasing the importance of preservation of these voices and artworks for the art historical record. Below are some examples from the selected websites; all websites will be accessible on https://carta.archive-it.org/ later this year.

Bibiana Suárez is a Puerto Rican artist and art educator. Her website showcases her bright graphic work that explores topics such as cock fighting, colorism, and food cultures within Puerto Rican history. The nominator added, “her work should be preserved because she asks the hard-hitting questions that allow people to take apart what creates struggles within the Puerto Rican Diaspora.”

Bibiana Suárez, (left) El niño Atocha con dálmatas / Little Jesus with Dalmatians & (right) Jackie, digital print on paper, 1997-1998

On her website, Suárez shares that her work is a reflection on her experience of acculturation after living in the US for nearly as long as she’s lived in Puerto Rico. She writes, “[w]hile I may acculturate, I resist assimilation,” a theme that is expressed throughout her work. 

Another selected artist, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, has been exhibiting her work since the 1980s, choosing to focus on fiber arts at a time when weaving was considered “craft,” not “art.” As the daughter of a Huichol-descended father who weaved and a Mexican-American mother who embroidered, it has always been important to the artist to continue these ancestral practices and insist on their legitimacy in the world of “fine arts.” From the nominator: “Her work brings visibility to the fiber art field and reflects the experience of women, of the Latinx community, and the US/Mexico border as place.”

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, wall installation from The Armory Show with Ruiz-Healy Art, New York, NY, 2023

Artists will continue to use the internet to create, document, and engage with their artistic practice. Websites like these document decades of an artist’s work and are essential parts of an artist’s legacy. When they disappear, we lose invaluable documentation of an artist’s career and evidence of their larger impact. Preserving these websites has become an important part of preserving art history now and CARTA is spearheading this coordinated effort to ensure these websites are available in the future. 

To learn more about CARTA and the artists’ websites that are preserved in the collections, visit https://carta.archive-it.org/.

The Seers: Mystic Cats, Feminist Histories, and the Art of the Archive

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Internet Archive’s latest Artist in Residence, Cindy Rehm, has created The Seers, a project comprised of one hundred college drawings using images largely sourced from historic books at the Internet Archive. The Seers is inspired by the work of Hélène Cixous and Carolee Schneemann around their interest in the creative process, and mysticism often centered in the figure of the cat. Rehm searched historic books related to women and their feline companions including books on the history of cats in mysticism and witchcraft. For her collages, she gleaned images for their aesthetic and symbolic resonance, focusing on books related to histories of women including books on textiles and handiwork, art history, nature, cats, and other creatures. 

For the format of the series, Rehm researched Internet Archive’s collection of antique scrapbooks. The scrapbook is a vernacular form often associated with women and their private lives, and also shares a process relationship with collage, where small fragments are cut and pasted. Historic scrapbooks were often made using repurposed books like catalogs, ledgers, and music books. Rehm borrowed this gesture of layering fragments over a main image, as image cut outs were repeated and remixed across the series to develop a symbolic language and esoteric taxonomy. 

Sample scrapbooks:
Helen Louise Bailey scrapbook, 1920
https://archive.org/details/helenlouisebaileyscrapbook/page/n3/mode/2up

Edwina Devendorf Scrapbook, 1915/1936
https://archive.org/details/ccarm_008888

Charlotte Roese, “Album of a Family” 1895/1945
https://archive.org/details/cmlpl_000893

As part of her project, Rehm created a limited-edition poster that she distributed during her participation in Public Domain Day on site at Internet Archive. Rehm gave a talk about her project and process, view the livestream recording here.

In February, Rehm will take The Seers to Automata in Los Angeles for a residency focused on extending the project to include an installation and performance. Please visit Rehm’s website to view The Seers full series.

About the artist

Cindy Rehm (https://www.cindyrehm.com/) is a Los Angeles-based artist and an educator. She serves as co-facilitator of the Cixous Reading Group, and is co-founder of the feminist-centered projects Craftswoman House and Feminist Love Letters. She is the founder and former director of spare room, a DIY installation space in Baltimore, MD. In 2021, she launched HEXENTEXTE, a collaborative project at the intersection of image, text and the body. 

Rehm has held residencies at Performing Arts Forum in Saint Ermes, France and at Casa Lü, Mexico City. A book of her collage drawings, Transference, was released by Curious Publishing in 2022.

Blending Art and Technology Opens New Doors for Internet Archive’s Recent Artist in Residence

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As an Artist in Residence, Swilk said the Internet Archive provided them with the time, space, and support to create a meaningful piece of art that has opened up new possibilities.

“When you’re looking for something, it’s important to know who was in love” by Swilk.

Unveiled in November 2024, their immersive art exhibit combined weaving and technology to highlight the critical role of the internet during the HIV/AIDS crisis. Swilk, a 30-year-old artist based in Oakland, California, spent six months on the project with their colleague, Patty Pacheco — researching, designing and producing it for a show at the Internet Archive’s headquarters in San Francisco.

“I felt like the Archive placed a lot of trust in me,” said Swilk of the sprawling installation in the Great Room. “They let me experiment in a space that was very important to them. I was grateful to be among people who would let me really dream.”

The finished piece, When you’re looking for something, it’s important to know who was in love, drew on thousands of historic HIV/AIDS documents and web resources in the Archive’s collection — many of which have since been altered or scrubbed off the live web. Swilk’s weavings were programmed with motors to breathe and pulse whenever users interacted with those archived resources on Internet Archive servers.

The idea for the project, like much of Swilk’s work, centers on concepts of home and historic origins.

Swilk’s weavings were programmed with motors to breathe and pulse whenever users interacted with those archived resources on Internet Archive servers.

“As a queer person growing up in the Midwest, I found a lot of solace on the internet, and community,” Swilk said. “The more I was able to connect with my own history through content I found on the internet, the more at home I felt.”

In their household, HIV was a very charged subject, and misinformation swirled around, so Swilk turned online for answers.

“The internet was this deeply impactful, incredible resource that was harboring so much information,” Swilk said. “I wanted to make something that highlighted that.”

Swilk said they long wanted to automate their work, and the Internet Archive provided the appropriate development space to mount motors and technical assistance to make the piece come to life.

“I didn’t know anything about computers,” Swilk said, prior to coming into the Artist in Residence program. “Being able to incorporate mechanization into my art feels like I have a completely new medium to paint with now — and that feels really exciting.”

Swilk credits the team at the Archive (Amir Esfahani, Evan Sirchuk, David Eisenberg) for helping make the exhibit happen. 

Artist in Residence Program
The Internet Archive’s Artist in Residency is organized by Amir Saber Esfahani, and is designed to connect artists with the archive’s collections to show what is possible when open access to information meets the arts. Please contact Amir at amir@archive.org for any inquiries.

Swilk was pleased with the response to the installation, which was viewed by hundreds of people during the Archive’s annual event in October and a reception in November. They look forward to incorporating more technology into their art. Swilk also composed music that played in the background with the exhibit. It was composed over field recordings of spaces HIV information was traditionally spread, such as coffee shops, night clubs, and hospitals. It included a quote from a 1997 interview by HIV activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya. Other synths were made from modulated retro computer sounds. 

“Whenever I’m given the opportunity to be a resident artist somewhere, my work explodes,” Swilk said. “I really feel like this is putting my work in a different direction. I don’t think I’m going to make something that doesn’t move again.”

Although the program ended with the show, Swilk said it doesn’t feel like it’s over. “I very much feel like this is the start of something. I’m very excited about what comes next,” they said. “I think that’s the point of a successful residency: to develop work that we can use to jump off.”

Swilk said there are so many ways to use the Internet Archive, both digitally and physically, to do creative and interesting projects outside of the box. “It’s a place where you can come with big ideas and leave with them realized.”