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.
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.”
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.”
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/