With Soft Network, experimental artists from the past are given a new life

Bankers’ boxes, flat file cabinets, archive wallets: they’re all there, placed with intention and order, housing the work of often overlooked but exciting artists. Soft network‘s Soho office. Co-founded in 2021 by curator Chelsea Spengemannnow executive director and artist Sara VanderbeekSoft Network is a nonprofit organization that “preserves and makes accessible the work of vital but often vulnerable experimental artists and those who care for them.” It does this by helping artists and those who manage artist properties – or legacy workers, as they are called – catalog, store, digitize and exhibit works of art through a two-year Archive-in-Residence program. This helps artists and older workers preserve estates for the future; the ultimate goal is not to house permanent work, but for the estate to stand alone in the art world.

The idea arose from personal experience. Spengemann assisted Sara VanDerBeek in managing the estate of Sara’s artist father Stan Vanderbeekfor almost twenty years, and they realized that there were little to no resources to help people who had been bequeathed artist property but lacked their expertise in the art world. Spengemann believes that this type of heritage work has remained under the radar for a long time, because it is seen as a form of care provision. But while many have developed a greater appreciation and understanding of what physical and emotional care entails in our post-pandemic world, it is still difficult for some to see the parallels with managing artists’ assets. Like medical care, managing an estate can be emotional, labor-intensive and time-consuming work, albeit of a different kind.

“Every time you see work by a dead artist in a gallery or museum, there is a living person who made that possible,” Spengemann told Observer. “This labor is often not compensated, even though it is a lot of work to maintain and even revive an artist’s career.” Soft Network’s fully funded residency makes it easier: the organization acts as an artistic caretaker for artists’ domains. And the estate can continue to use Soft Network as a resource after the residency is over, through programs such as the Artist Foundations & Estate Leaders List, or AFELL, which is “a membership-based, peer-to-peer listserv for resource sharing, available to artists and legacy workers.”

SEE ALSO: Director Thelma Golden on the future of programming at the Studio Museum in Harlem

During the Archive-in-Residence program, an artist’s archive is not only catalogued, researched and digitized, but also exhibited in Soft Network’s own exhibition space in two accompanying shows of four to six weeks: a group exhibition in which contemporary artists enter into conversation with the resident work and a resident solo show. There may also be public programs that deal with the work. And Soft Network also helps older workers make the kind of connections with the art world that will help ensure the estate’s future.

For example, when supporting the work of Haitian-American mixed media artist Paul Gardère, Soft Network secured a nonprofit booth at Independent 20th Century to bring Gardère’s work to a larger audience. With the recent one OFFSCREEN art fair of image-based works in Paris, Soft Network exhibited the work of their current Archive-in-Residence of filmmaker, film editor and photographer Susan Brockman. They won a prize for best presentation, which awarded €10,000 to support the preservation of Brockman’s work and access to it. The Archive-in-Residence 2025-2027 will be that of a photographer Sheyla Baykala longtime chronicler of the avant-garde scenes in downtown New York who died in 1997.

According to Spengemann, the collections that Soft Network works with most are film, photography, experimental and mixed-media work. These are “the most difficult to maintain and access beyond an artist’s lifetime because they are not as simple as a three-dimensional painting or sculpture,” she said. Figuring out how to present these works can be tricky. Because in some cases the artist had no market when it was created, there is now little money for conservation. Since the launch of Soft Network, many artist houses have found them through word of mouth. In addition to the Archive-in-Residence, they collaborate with three artist domains that are kept in their archives for a fee: the Stan VanDerBeek Archive, the Rosemary Meijer Estate and the Shirley Gorelick Foundations have any work on site; the associated fees help keep the organization solvent, as does the estate advisory work it offers on a sliding scale.

During our conversation, Spengemann emphasized that Soft Network is not a gallery, but rather a “shared studio and active storage space with access to an exhibition space.” That space is shared with designer Rachel Comeya longtime supporter of the organization. Soft Network provides artwork for its showroom in exchange for the space to exhibit work and hold public programs that bring the work of previously overlooked artists into a modern conversation. For example, on October 28 and 30 there will be events around the work of painter Shirley Gorelick, which will be hung in the space, including discussions on portraiture, community and memory with historians, academics, archivists and artists. In addition to public programs and exhibitions, historians, artists and curators can view residents’ work in the Soft Network offices by appointment.

It is perhaps not surprising that many of the estates Soft Network works with belong to artists who were women, people of color and/or queer. These works are pieces of art history that have previously been ignored or left out of the story, Spengemann says, but through Soft Network they can be part of the conversation again – or in some cases for the first time. These artists then become accessible to contemporary artists looking for inspiration, curators looking for missing pieces of a puzzle, and historians describing parts of the art world that were once invisible.

“We’re really just trying to be a community for people who are doing this work, to make this work visible and then as a group to help a particular estate and collection with whatever they need,” Spengemann said. Artists often operate through community, she added, and hers is dedicated to liberating their work from the bankers’ cubicles, literally and figuratively.

Donate to help fund Soft Network’s efforts here.