How to make an artwork inventory
An artwork inventory is a list of every work you have made, with enough detail that someone else could find it, identify it and know where it is. Galleries ask for one. Insurers ask for one. Your estate will need one. The best time to start is before you need it.
What to record for each work
- An inventory number. One per work, never reused. More on this below.
- Title and year. Use the title exactly as it will appear on labels and in your CV.
- Medium. Specific enough to care for it: "oil on linen", not "painting".
- Dimensions. Height before width, then depth for objects. Give inches and centimetres if you show abroad.
- Framed size, if it differs, and what the frame is.
- Status. Available, on consignment, sold, gifted, destroyed.
- Location. The studio, a storage unit, the gallery that has it.
- Photographs. At least one good image of the whole work, filed under its number.
- Price, if it is for sale, and the date that price was set.
- Provenance and exhibitions, as they happen: who bought it, where it was shown.
Number every work
A number does a job a title cannot. Titles repeat ("Untitled" appears in many inventories), titles change, and two works can share one. A number stays fixed for the life of the work.
Keep the numbers meaningless. If the number encodes the year or the medium, it breaks the first time a work is dated wrong or reclassified. Start at 1000 and count up. Never reuse the number of a work that was destroyed or painted over: that number may already be on a label, an invoice or a condition report somewhere.
File the photographs where the record can find them
Most artists' photographs live in a camera roll or a folder called "new work final 2". Give each work its own folder, named with its number and title, and name every file the same way. Keep a full-size master, and make the smaller sizes from it: one for print, one for submissions, one for posting.
Start small
Do not try to catalogue everything in a weekend. Start with the work in the studio now, then everything that is out at galleries, then go back year by year. An inventory with twenty complete records is more useful than one with two hundred names and nothing else.
Doing it in Studio Archive Pro
Studio Archive Pro is an artwork inventory for Mac, iPad and iPhone. Every work gets a number that never changes, its photographs are filed and named in the sizes above, and the archive is ordinary folders on your own disk, readable with or without the app. Free for a month, then $29.99 once.