The experience of losing one’s own work can bring about a unique kind of shame that is often kept hidden. It is not the kind of shame that comes with a public failure or a dramatic ending, but rather a quieter, more insidious shame that convinces you not to seek help and makes you feel like a failure for not being more responsible or organized.
Several years ago, I found myself unable to afford the payment on a storage unit in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where I had stored a significant portion of my work. Without warning, the unit was auctioned off, and my work was dispersed without my knowledge. Pieces from the storage unit ended up being used as interior décor by a vintage design shop in Philadelphia, with individual components of my work being sold without my consent. This loss was not just a loss of objects, but a loss of authorship, context, and control over my own work.
In his book “Archive Fever,” Jacques Derrida discusses the archive as a site of authority and exclusion, where decisions about what is preserved and how it is ordered are made by those in power. Losing control of my work was not just a material loss, but a loss of archival authority and a reminder that preservation is intertwined with power dynamics that often do not favor the artist.
The vulnerability of artists’ archives is exacerbated by the lack of meaningful infrastructure to protect them from environmental disasters like fires, floods, and storms. A fire that tore through an artist studio building in Brooklyn destroyed decades of work in a matter of hours, highlighting the fragility of artists’ archives and the absence of adequate protection.
The loss of my work from the storage unit was particularly devastating because it included pieces from an exhibition dedicated to my late brother, who passed away from sickle cell disease. Seeing these works dismantled and sold off without context felt like a secondary loss, compounding the grief of losing my brother.
The shame that accompanies the loss of one’s work is not just about the loss itself, but about the performance expected of artists to appear stable and successful. Artists are often forced to hide their vulnerabilities and present a facade of competence, even when they are struggling behind the scenes.
In the face of archival precarity, artists must rely on survival strategies such as digitization, shared storage, and mutual aid to protect their work. The precarious archive is a condition of contemporary artistic life that requires a collective effort to ensure artists’ legacies are preserved.
Despite the constant threat of loss, artists continue to create and persevere, knowing that their work exists on borrowed time. Their endurance deserves recognition and support, rather than silence and shame.
