Bank boxes, flat file cabinets, archival portfolios—they're all here, placed with purpose and order, preserving the work of often overlooked but exciting artists in Soft Network's Soho office. Founded in 2021 by curator Chelsea Spengemann, now executive director, and artist Sara Vanderbeek, Soft Network is a nonprofit that “preserves and provides access to the work of important but often vulnerable experimental artists and those who care for them.” It does this by assisting artists and those who manage artist spaces—or estate staff, as they are known—in cataloging, storing, digitizing and displaying artwork through a two-year Archive-in-Residence program. This helps artists and historians to preserve sites for the future; the main goal is not to do housework forever but to help the legacy stand alone in the field of art.
The idea was born out of personal experience. Spengemann had been helping Sara VanDerBeek manage the estate of Sara's father, the artist Stan Vanderbeek, for almost twenty years, and they realized that there were few resources to help people who had been given the legacy of artists but lacked international expertise. . Spengemann believes that this type of legacy work has long flown under the radar because it is seen as a form of maintenance. But while many have grown to appreciate and understand more about what goes into physical and emotional care in our post-pandemic world, it's still hard for some to see the parallels in the management of artist spaces. Like medical care, managing an estate can be an emotional, exhausting and time-consuming task, albeit of a different kind.
“Every time you see a dead artist's work in an art gallery or museum, there is someone alive who made it happen,” Spengemann told the Observer. “This work is often not compensated, although it is a lot of work to preserve and even revive the work of an artist.” Soft Network's fully funded residency makes it easy—the organization acts as a curator of art in artists' spaces. And the estate can continue to tap into the Soft Network as a resource after the residency is over through programs like the Artist Foundations & Estate Leaders List, or AFELL, “a membership-based, peer-to-peer resource-sharing list. , available to artists and heritage workers.”
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During the Archive-in-Residence program, the artist's archive is not only cataloged, researched and digitized but also displayed in the Soft Network exhibition space in two parallel exhibitions of four to six weeks: a group exhibition that brings together contemporary artists in conversation with them. resident work and solo exhibition. There may be social programs that work with the job as well. And Soft Network also helps heritage workers create the kind of art world connections that help ensure the future of the area.
For example, while supporting the work of Haitian-American multimedia artist Paul Gardère, Soft Network acquired a booth as a non-profit organization at Independent 20th Century to put Gardère's work in front of a wider audience. At the recent OFFSCREEN art exhibition of photo-based works in Paris, Soft Network showcased the work of their current residency by filmmaker, film editor and photographer Susan Brockman. They won the Best Presentation award, which came with €10,000 to support the preservation of Brockman's work and access to it. The Archive-in-Residence for 2025-2027 will be that of photographer Sheyla Baykal, a long-time chronicler of New York City's avant-garde scenes who died in 1997.
The Soft Network Collections work mainly with, according to Spengemann, film, photography, experimental work and mixed media. These are “the most difficult to care for and make accessible after the artist's life because they are not straightforward like a three-dimensional painting or sculpture,” he said. Finding a way to present these works can be challenging and, in some cases, because the artist did not have a market when they were created, there is little money to spare. Since the launch of the Soft Network, many artist sites have found themselves through word of mouth. In addition to the Archives, they operate three artists' galleries that host their historic sites for a fee—the Stan VanDerBeek Archive, the Rosemary Mayer Estate and the Shirley Gorelick Foundation each have work in the building; matching funds help keep the organization solvent, as does consulting and the legacy it provides at a smooth rate.
During our interview, Spengemann stressed that Soft Network is not a gallery but a “shared studio and functional storage space with access to an exhibition space.” That space was shared by designer Rachel Comey, a longtime supporter of the organization. Soft Network offers her own gallery of artwork in exchange for a space to show work and host public events that bring the work of neglected artists into the contemporary conversation. Coming up on October 28 and 30, for example, events focusing on the work of artist Shirley Gorelick, which will be hung in the space, including discussions about image, society and memory involving historians, academics, archivists and artists. In addition to public programs and exhibitions, historians, artists, and curators can view resident work at the Soft Network offices by appointment.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the domains Soft Network works with are artists who were women, people of color and/or queer. These works are pieces of art history that have been overlooked or left out of the narrative before, Spengemann says, but with Soft Network, they can become part of the conversation again—or in some cases, for the first time. These artists are then accessible to contemporary artists looking for inspiration, curators looking for missing pieces of the puzzle and historians to recount parts of the art world that have never been seen before.
“We are just trying to be a community of people who do this work, make this work visible and as a group help a certain area and collect whatever they need,” said Spengemann. Artists often use the community, he added, and his is dedicated to freeing their work from those bank boxes, literally and figuratively.
Donate to help fund Soft Network's efforts here.
