We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2016
In 2009, I was two years into my tenure as a museum employee, managing a collection of small exhibition brochures, pamphlets and gallery announcements at the National Gallery of Art Library. That summer, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith reported on a phenomenon I had also observed in my capacity as Reference Librarian for Vertical Files: the decline of the printed gallery post card. Smith's ArtsBeat blog post, ‘Gallery Card as Relic,’ is a breezy elegy surveying recent “final notice” cards mailed from commercial galleries that were “going green” by eliminating paper mailings. I, however, was feeling less light-hearted about the demise of what Smith describes as a “useful bit of art-world indicator…[and] an indispensable constant creatively deployed by artists, avidly cherished by the ephemera-obsessed and devotedly archived by museums.”
1. Smith, Roberta, “Gallery Card as Relic?” New York Times ArtsBeat, June 23, 2009, http://www.artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/gallery-card-as-relic.
2. Further discussion of the activities of the Artists Files SIG, Deutch, Samantha, and McKay, Sally. Forthcoming. “The Future of Artists Files: Here Today Gone Tomorrow,” Art Documentation, Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 35, no. 1 (Spring 2016)Google Scholar.
7. Ricky Erway et al., Shifting Gears Gearing up to Get into the Flow (Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Programs and Research, 2007), 3. Also available online at http://www.oclc.org/programs/publications/reports/2007-02.pdf.
8. College Art Association of America et al., Code of Best Practices in Fair use for the Visual Arts: February 2015 (2015), 13Google Scholar. Also Available online at, http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/fair-use/best-practices-fair-use-visual-arts.pdf.
9. ARLIS/NA Artists Files SIG, https://www.archive-it.org/organizations/783.
10. New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), https://www.archive-it.org/organizations/484.
11. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries, Digital artists’ file, https://www.archive-it.org/collections/3607.
12. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Contemporary women artists on the web, https://www.archive-it.org/collections/2973.
13. Phillpot, Clive, “Flies in the Files: Ephemera in the Art Library,” Art Documentation: Bulletin of the Art Libraries Society of North America 14 (Spring 1995): 13–14Google Scholar.
14. Cooke, Jacqueline, “Heterotopia: Art Ephemera, Libraries, and Alternative Space,” Art Documentation: Bulletin of the Art Libraries Society of North America 25, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 38Google Scholar.
15. Senior, David et al. , Please Come to the Show (2014)Google Scholar.
16. Steven Leiber et al., Extra Art: a Survey of Artists’ Ephemera, 1960–1999 (Santa Monica: Smart Art Press, 2001).
17. Eleey, Peter et al. , Sturtevant: Double Trouble (2014), 59Google Scholar.
