The number isn’t precise because the number never existed. There was no inventory, no scan, no list.
The 2000s. I was renting space from a friend. Water pipes broke. Cardboard, paper, canvas — the works that depended on dry storage soaked through. What could be salvaged was salvaged.
Then, months later, bed bugs.
What had survived the water didn’t survive the second event. Everything stored in that space had to be discarded — preventatively, completely. Collage, sculpture, prints, painted constructions. Every medium I worked in during that decade.
There are no images. There are no records. There is no list. What remains is memory.
The archive on this site — 1,084 works, 1974 to the present — exists in part because of that loss. Every piece is photographed. Every piece is described. Every piece has a backup of its backup. The metadata schema is open source. The ingest pipeline is open source. Anyone who wants to build the same thing for their own studio can fork it.
This page is here so the lost works aren’t forgotten twice — once when the pipes broke, and again by silence.
If you are an artist with work in storage you have not catalogued: this is the message. Not be careful. Be early.
— JEFFREY F. S. NEUMANN