The mission of Contemporary Art Library is to organize, preserve, and make accessible the art history of our time.
Organize
Before our organization's first project, Contemporary Art Daily, it was very difficult to find high quality documentation of art exhibitions anywhere. Unless you were a collector or professional with a direct relationship to a given gallery or institution, you had to make do with, at best, a small selection of low resolution images.
We helped change the art world's expectations around the sharing of high quality, thorough documentation, which is now routinely available on Contemporary Art Daily and other websites. But this universe of documentation is scattered across thousands of individual archives of varying quality, structure, and means of access.
We believe that by organizing as much documentation of contemporary art as we can into a single, interconnected library, we can make all of that documentation radically more useful. And we hope that better education and research leads to better galleries, institutions, scholarship, and ultimately to a better field.
Preserve
Before Contemporary Art Library, there was no definitive, trustworthy place for documentation of art to live. We intend to build a lasting institution that will protect the substantial body of knowledge represented in the Library's archives using current digital preservation strategies.
As spaces close, websites get taken down, and hard drives get buried in storage units, crucial corners of art history can disappear from public view and risk being lost forever.
By collecting as much documentation of current activity as we can, and by focusing on closed, temporal and under-funded spaces as we collect documentation of past activity, we hope to protect as much recent art history as we can by adding it to the Library's records.
Make Accessible
Access to Contemporary Art Library will always be free to anyone with an internet connection. We will invest a substantial portion of our resources to constantly improve our website's accessibility to users with disabilities. We'll do our best to make sure the website is clear and easy to use.
We believe learning about art should be available to anyone, and that opening up access to art as a system of knowledge makes the field fundamentally more open and, eventually, more just.
* * *
If you support these ideas, consider becoming a Member of the Library.
Organize
Before our organization's first project, Contemporary Art Daily, it was very difficult to find high quality documentation of art exhibitions anywhere. Unless you were a collector or professional with a direct relationship to a given gallery or institution, you had to make do with, at best, a small selection of low resolution images.
We helped change the art world's expectations around the sharing of high quality, thorough documentation, which is now routinely available on Contemporary Art Daily and other websites. But this universe of documentation is scattered across thousands of individual archives of varying quality, structure, and means of access.
We believe that by organizing as much documentation of contemporary art as we can into a single, interconnected library, we can make all of that documentation radically more useful. And we hope that better education and research leads to better galleries, institutions, scholarship, and ultimately to a better field.
Preserve
Before Contemporary Art Library, there was no definitive, trustworthy place for documentation of art to live. We intend to build a lasting institution that will protect the substantial body of knowledge represented in the Library's archives using current digital preservation strategies.
As spaces close, websites get taken down, and hard drives get buried in storage units, crucial corners of art history can disappear from public view and risk being lost forever.
By collecting as much documentation of current activity as we can, and by focusing on closed, temporal and under-funded spaces as we collect documentation of past activity, we hope to protect as much recent art history as we can by adding it to the Library's records.
Make Accessible
Access to Contemporary Art Library will always be free to anyone with an internet connection. We will invest a substantial portion of our resources to constantly improve our website's accessibility to users with disabilities. We'll do our best to make sure the website is clear and easy to use.
We believe learning about art should be available to anyone, and that opening up access to art as a system of knowledge makes the field fundamentally more open and, eventually, more just.
* * *
If you support these ideas, consider becoming a Member of the Library.