Fund the work directly

Support runs through Buy Me a Coffee, which handles the payment. You can give once, in any amount, or set up a monthly level. Neither requires an account here, and one-off support is just as useful — a single contribution is not a lesser version of a subscription.

These are works in progress. Early access is a promise about things that do not exist yet — the features are being built and there is no date on any of them. Support the work because you want the archive to exist, not because of what a tier gets you. If you would rather wait until there is more to show, that is a reasonable thing to do and we would rather you did that than feel misled.

Institutional support is coming and will look different — cross-market views and archival reports for organizations that can pay for research. That is not built, so it is not for sale.

Research and digitization. We hold 131 market editions going back to 1922, but artist lists for only a few of those years. The rest exist on paper — in boxes, in institutional archives, and in the memory of the people who ran these markets. Finding them, reading them and getting them into the record is slow, skilled work, and it is the most perishable work in this field: every year that passes, some of it stops being recoverable.

Images. There is not one photograph of a single work in this directory. For a visual field, that is the largest gap between what this is and what it should be.

The people who check the records. Identity matches, spellings and affiliations are judgements a machine should not make alone. Community reviewers do that work now, and it is unpaid. Paying them is what funding would change first.

Fiscal sponsorship. If your organization sponsors projects like this one, or you can introduce us to one that does, that unblocks everything else on this page. Contact us.

Archives. If you hold old market programs, catalogues, artist lists or photographs, we want to hear about them — including if you are not ready to part with them.

Corrections. If you know this field, tell us what we have got wrong. Any free member can do this from the site — every record has a “Something look wrong?” form at the bottom of it. If you would rather not make an account, write to info@nativeart.directory instead. Both reach a person.