Not accepting donations yet

Digitizing the historical rosters. We hold 131 market editions going back to 1922, but artist lists for only the most recent years. The rosters from 1922 to 2023 exist on paper, in boxes, in institutional archives and in the memories of people who ran these markets. Recovering them is the most valuable and most perishable work in this field.

Paying community-led reviewers. Identity matches, generational suffixes, spellings and affiliations are judgements a machine should not make alone. In time, reviewers from the community would check that work — and be paid for it. Volunteer labour from the people whose records these are would be its own kind of extraction.

The features still to come. Artist-held records and cards, images, self-service corrections, historical rosters, award attribution, a curators list, and eventually an application system owned by the field rather than sold to it. Each of those is written up, with what is blocking it, on the roadmap.

Images. There is not one photograph of a single work in this directory. For a visual field, that is the largest gap between what this is and what it should be.

Replacing the application system. Every market roster in the country flows through third-party software that artists pay to use and that returns nothing to them. Native-owned infrastructure for that process would change the economics of showing work.

Fiscal sponsorship. If your organization sponsors projects like this one, or you can introduce us to one that does, that unblocks everything else on this page.

Archives. If you hold old market programs, catalogues, roster sheets or photographs, we want to hear about them — including if you are not ready to part with them.

Corrections. If you know this field, tell us what we have got wrong.

Join the curators list. Curators, writers and researchers can register now. If institutions ask us for names, consulting work goes to that list.