With my training in digital archiving and collections management, artists have entrusted me to document, catalogue, and create digital archives of their portfolios and corresponding ephemera.
Digital Archiving Projects
Martin B. Johnson
2017–2018Catalogued and digitized 3500 paintings, sculptures, drawings, multimedia installations, press clippings, writings, and audiovisual recordings. Liaised with ten museum registrars nationwide to update artist and object records from The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States (2008).
Created online catalogue raisonné, designed website, and cultivated online identity. Reflecting the artist’s creative impetus, spanning more than five decades and showcased in the film Herb and Dorothy 50x50 (2013), this web project functions as an online catalogue raisonné, professional website, and interactive hub for Johnson’s ongoing explorations.
Artist Biography
Gaining recognition throughout the mid-Atlantic region during the early 1970s and 1980s, Martin Johnson (b. 1951) secured one of the first residencies at P.S.1 (now known as MoMA P.S.1), where he worked from 1979 to 1982. During that time, curator Marcia Tucker and gallery owner Phyllis Kind championed Johnson's work. With critical attention from art historian and art critic Donald Kuspit, Johnson captivated private art collectors Don and Mera Rubell (The Rubell Museum; formerly the Rubell Family Collection) and Dorothy and Herbert Vogel. With the Vogels’ 2008 bequest of fifty artworks each to fifty museums across the United States (2500 objects in all), thirty-six museums acquired Johnson's work.
Johnson was born in New Jersey and resides in Richmond, Virginia. He received his BA in Architecture from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1974 and his MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1977. In 2023, Johnson opened the Museumofor, a one-of-a-kind, immersive art destination in the heart of Richmond Virginia.
Myron Helfgott
2017Worked in studio to survey and digitally catalogue 40+ years of two- and three-dimensional objects, video and sound installations, and ephemeral works. Developed cataloguing system, descriptive metadata, and catalogue identifiers to document 150 artworks in Excel. Coordinated with two art handlers in studio and storage facilities to identify, document, move, and organize twenty-five large-scale objects.
Artist Biography
Combining woodworking, sculpture, painting, photography, audio, kinetics, and video, Myron Helfgott (1936–2020) worked at the intersections of Arte Povera, Pop, Nouveau Realisme, neo-dada, and Conceptualism. Culling from Zen Buddhism, art history, satire, and humor, Helfgott elevated and undermined the forlorn, the banal, and the commonplace. In his work, fragments of his memories are interwoven with photographic images of readily recognizable subjects. Enlarged photographs of the artist, his acquaintances, and his friends are juxtaposed with bodies of water, cloud-strewn skies, foliage, near-vacant parking lots, Hello Kitty, and Corinthian columns. Alternately printed on paper and light-projected onto surfaces, these images play with the veracity of ground—the substrate for both beings and art—and the nature of existence itself.
A professor in the Sculpture and Extended Media Department, Helfgott joined the faculty in 1968, when Richmond Professional Institute and the Medical College of Virginia merged to become Virginia Commonwealth University, and taught until 2004. He served as the Chair of Sculpture and Extended Media from 2001 to 2003. See also “Myron Helfgott: The Ultimate Show,” 1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA, 2022.
Rubin Peacock
2015–2016Organized, digitized, and catalogued over 2000 photographs, publications, press clippings, exhibition records, object files, commissions, and provenance records in cloud database. Created cataloguing system with unique identifiers and descriptive metadata.
Liaised with Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Director of Library and Special Collections to initiate and formalize bequest of archival files, which the VMFA Archives opened in 2022 as the Rubin Peacock Artist Archives (VA.08). Project culminated in autobiographical volume Rubin Peacock: 50 Years of Bronze Sculpture (print and eBook, 2019).
Artist Biography
Rubin Peacock (b. 1941, Catawba) is a bronze sculptor whose works have been inspired by nature, ancient civilizations, and his Catawba ancestry. Using abstractions of geometric and organic forms, Peacock’s work explores humanity’s relationship with nature and the permanence of creating art with bronze. In his words: “my art has evolved from a place in my soul that I know very little about, a place of spontaneity, inventions, mystical illusions, with very few restraints. I often work extemporaneously after exploring a visual thought pattern and associated feelings for extended periods of time. It is in essence, the pouring out of my personality and life experiences into visible things” (Peacock, email to Sarah Kleinman, 5 Aug. 2015).
As a percussionist with a traveling rock and roll band in 1960, Peacock used his earnings from his music performances to pursue a BS and BFA from the University of Georgia in Athens. Upon completing his undergraduate education in 1965, he joined the Peace Corps as an art teacher (1965–67), teaching students at Camp Cobbla in Jamaica and creating a scholarship for two of his students by selling his sculptures in an exhibition at the Bolivar Gallery in 1967. After a brief hiatus to travel and study art throughout Central and South America, Peacock returned to the US to continue his education, graduating with a MFA from Richmond Professional Institute—now Virginia Commonwealth University—in 1969. Choosing to establish himself in Virginia, he purchased “Marlboro,” an abandoned house in Aylett, King William County, that he transformed into the Aylett Art Foundry. In 1985, he purchased his Richmond studio and gallery at the intersection of Broad Street and Brook Road.
Peacock has been commissioned by institutions such as the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, George Mason’s Gunston Hall, Washington National Cathedral, National Electronics Museum, ER Carpenter Company, and numerous private collectors. His work is in the permanent collections of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Chrysler Museum of Art, University of Richmond, Wake Forest University, and America’s Gateway Park.
Web Development
My training as a digital archivist and visual and digital content specialist have allowed me to support professional organizations and businesses in web development, design, and social media management. For these projects, see my Web Development page.