The Living Collections Catalogue (volumes III and IV)

Submitter:
Emmet Byrne

Company:
Walker Art Center

Link:
https://walkerart.org/living-collections-catalogue

Concept/Purpose of the Work:
For the third and fourth volumes of the Walker's Living Collections catalogue, our design and digital teams decided to redesign and rebuild the publication, improving upon what we learned from the first two volumes. Each volume of the Living Collections Catalogue includes media-rich essays on broader themes as well as in-depth investigations of specific works of art. Featured works link to records in the Walker’s collections database, where additional information about the artists and artworks is available. Implicit in the concept of a “living catalogue” is the dynamic nature of an online volume about the Walker’s collections. Information in the database is updated as new research and presentations occur, while essays are versioned and citable with assurances of a permanent address to the information referenced. With its Living Collections Catalogue, the Walker aims to create a sustainable publishing platform that will be of service to academics and art enthusiasts. The designs adopt a visual aesthetic for navigation and page layouts blending the best qualities of the book, magazine, and online forms. With the release of new volumes, we anticipate adding new features and making improvements as our understanding of this hybrid environment—the intersection of a collections database with printed catalogue and digital reading environments continues to evolve. The third volume traces a rich period of artistic experimentation with forms of radical collectivity, aesthetic production, and political mobilization. Presenting newly commissioned texts and surfacing unique archival materials, the publication explores the work of artists active in the United States between the 1960s and the 1980s whose practices were highly collaborative, interdisciplinary, and often aligned with concurrent social movements. The fourth volume illustrates how jazz and the broader worlds of creative black music have been important parts of the Walker Art Center’s Performing Arts program since its inception. In the early 1960s the volunteer-run Center Arts Council began presenting genre-defining, totemic black jazz figures, often introducing their music to the Upper Midwest for the first time. While the Walker’s programming has over decades involved many leading figures in jazz and experimental music across racial, generational, cultural, and transnational lines, this volume of the Living Collections Catalogue—Creative Black Music at the Walker: Selections from the Archives—focuses on a select group of influential black artists who came to the fore in the ’60s and ’70s and appeared at the Walker multiple times, each having an indelible impact on US musical culture. Archival material not before available for public view is at the center of this publication, including rare audio and video recordings, photographs, posters and programs, and correspondence. The volume also features commissioned essays and interviews offering insightful perspectives from new generations of artists on these groundbreaking figures and movements. A timeline of selected performances highlights the remarkable range of black musicians and writers who appeared at the Walker from 1963 to 2019. In focusing on these vanguard artists with whom the Walker has had sustained relationships over time, Creative Black Music aspires to honor them and the art forms they helped forge—work that exemplifies artistic freedom, self-determination, racial justice, interdisciplinarity, and free-flowing creative expression.

Results of the Work:

How the Work Was Delivered to the Masses:
The Walker design and digital teams have created a digital publication system within Ember and Wordpress that allows for us to publish flexible layouts as discrete publications. For the new publications we developed new audio and video modules, since so much of the content was based on unearthing archival materials. The Living Collections Catalogue is designed to feel like a standalone, discrete, packaged universe of content, while also existing within the larger Walker website. To achieve this, much of the regular Walker website's navigation was peeled away and hidden in a discreet hamburger interface, allowing for a much more presentational and immersive web layout. Essays start with large immersive images and video, and feature diverse layouts to make the experience of reading long text more enjoyable. New modules were developed to allow for zooming into archival materials such as correspondence and newspaper articles. Since the audience for these publications is very scholarly, footnote and citation functionality was built into the layout and CMS.

Credits:
DESIGN & EDITORIAL
Jasio Stefanski, Digital Designer
Emmet Byrne, Design Director and Associate Curator of Design
Ian Babineau, Production Artist
Greg Beckel, Senior Imaging Specialist
Maury Jensen, Audio Production
Pamela Johnson, Senior Editor
Alanna Nissen, Design Studio Manager
Andy Underwood-Bultmann, Media Producer

DIGITAL PRODUCTION
Jim Cuene, Director of Technology and Digital Strategies
Angela Ettawageshik, Senior Project Manager, Digital Media
Kenner Luoma, Front End Developer
Kevin Schenk, Web Developer
Wade Stebbings, Software Architect

Tags:
Candid, Deep, Grateful

Category:
Interactive