I N S I D E T R A C K
BY DANIEL GRANT
MANAGE YOUR ART ON THE CLOUD
H
al Stringer, a 64-year-old retired information technology manager who lives in Orlando, once had a perfectly straightforward way to track the particulars of the roughly 190 paintings he owns: the artist’s name, title, date, medium, size, sale receipt, photographs — that kind of stuff. He would simply place the relevant papers in a manila envelope and attach it with a wire hanger to the back of the picture frame, so that everything was together. “Of course, in that scenario,” Stringer admits, “if a painting were to burn in a fire, so would all of the information about it.” But what actually prompted him to better organize the documentation was his loan of a painting to a friend — or was it to a relative? He cannot recall anymore, and it doesn’t matter anyway: the painting never came back because he forgot he had loaned it at all. So, in 2014, Stringer became a client of Artwork Archive, a cloud-based collections management firm founded in 2010 that allows him to upload images, receipts, and other information about each artwork, as well as to track its location. Now if a fire or — more likely in Florida — a hurricane damages his house, he may still lose the paintings, but their details won’t disappear, enabling him to file an insurance claim more easily. It is still very common for art collectors — perhaps including you, dear reader — to rely on memory, or file cards, or maybe an Excel spreadsheet. Fortunately, database systems for collections management have been growing in number over the past 20 years. Some are explicitly designed for commercial galleries and museums, including ArtBase, EmbARK, and FileMaker Pro. But a newer class has targeted artists and private collectors who generally have
fewer objects but still need to track what they own, where those items are located, and what may be out on loan to museums (in the case of collectors) or consigned to galleries (artists). The databases created for galleries and museums are “complicated and difficult for most collectors to use; their learning curve is steep,” warns Suzanne Quigley, owner of Art & Artifact Services, a collections management company. Most of those professional systems offer additional fields and nomenclature specific to the needs of their customers, such as pages devoted
Hal Stringer (left) and his partner, Kevin Miller, lend their artworks regularly. Here they celebrate the opening of the exhibition Captured in Paint: Central Florida in Art at the Albin Polasek Museum & Sculpture Gardens (Winter Park).
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