How a contemporary artist keeps a durable professional dossier

what a dossier is, and what it is not

A dossier is the checkable record of a practice. Not a mood board, not a selection of your best images, not a CV on its own — those are all parts of it, and none of them is it. The test is simple: can a person who does not know you establish, without asking you, what a given work is, when you made it, what it is made of, and where it has been seen?

It is not a portfolio in the design sense either. A portfolio argues; a dossier records. The argument changes with the audience and the year. The record should not.

what goes in it

Per work, the fields that a registrar, a jury or a writer will look for — and that you will not reliably remember in five years:

• Title, and year. If the year is a range because the work took three years, say the range.
• Medium, written specifically. "Mixed media" alone is the least searchable thing you can write; "mixed media: paper, wax, copper wire" serves a reader and is no more work.
• Dimensions, with units, and for time-based work a duration.
• Edition, as a fraction, or an explicit statement that the work is unique. A blank field reads as an oversight rather than as "not editioned".
• Rights and credit: who holds the copyright, who took the photograph, and how you want the work credited when someone reproduces it.
• Context: what it was shown in, where, and when — including group shows, which are the ones people forget to record.
• A visual description — a written account of what the image shows, for someone who cannot see it. It is what a screen reader announces, and it is also the only reason an image is findable in words at all.

and at the level of the practice

Above the individual works sit the facts about you, which are the ones an application form asks for at 11pm on the night of a deadline:

• A statement, current enough that you would still sign it.
• A short biography, and a longer one, because you will be asked for both.
• An exhibition history with venue, city, year, and whether it was solo or group. Type matters; a list that hides it invites the reader to assume the less generous reading.
• Education, residencies, awards, and any published writing about the work — with links that resolve.
• Representation, if you have it, and stated as a relationship both sides would confirm.
• A working contact route that is not a direct message in a social app.

why the metadata is the whole point

A picture with no medium and no year is an image. The same picture with medium, dimensions, year, edition and an exhibition line is a record — and the difference is not bureaucratic, it is what makes the work legible to everyone whose job involves handling it rather than looking at it.

Structured fields are also what make a practice findable at all. Nobody searches for you by name until they already know your name. They search for a discipline, a material, a city, a period. Text in an image cannot answer that; a medium field can.

And metadata is the part that decays fastest in memory and quickest in value. The dimensions of a work you made last month are trivially available to you today and genuinely hard to reconstruct in six years. Recording them is cheap exactly once.

permanent links, and why link rot is the quiet problem

Every URL you put in an application, a wall label, a press release or an email to a curator is a promise that it will still work. Most of them do not. Sites get redesigned, platforms get abandoned, hosting lapses, a CMS migration renumbers everything, and the link in the grant application you are proudest of resolves to nothing.

This is why permalink stability is worth treating as a requirement rather than a nicety: a work should have one address that does not change, and the address should be the thing you hand out. On artlito that is a closed commitment — a work's URL is meant to keep resolving, and the archive is built around that rather than around a feed position.

The practical version, wherever you keep the work: pick the canonical address for each work once, use that one everywhere, and never let a redesign silently change it.

what someone actually checks before contacting you

The realistic sequence, when a curator or a programmer is deciding whether to write to you, is short and unromantic. Is the work what it appeared to be at thumbnail size. What has it been shown in, and by whom. Is there an affiliation or a representation that can be confirmed. And is there a contact route that reaches you.

Almost every failure at that stage is a missing fact rather than a weak work. An exhibition history with no venues, a statement with no dates, a contact that goes nowhere, a link that has rotted — each of them turns a maybe into a not-now, and none of them is about the art.

why this is not LinkedIn

The comparison comes up constantly, and half of it is fair. A durable professional record, verified affiliations, a way to be found by what you do rather than by who already knows you — that is the useful half of a professional network, and the art world has never really had one.

The other half is the part to leave behind. Endorsements, connection counts, engagement-ranked feeds, the low-grade obligation to post — the machinery that turns a professional record into a popularity system. In an art context that machinery is worse than useless: it rewards the artists who are already visible and it teaches everyone to optimise for a number that no curator has ever cared about.

artlito's own framing of this is "LinkedIn for the art world, but it should not become LinkedIn with paintings", which is why there are no public follower counts, no likes, no trending page and no algorithmic default ordering. The credential half without the popularity half is the whole design.

a practical order of operations

If the dossier does not exist yet, building it in this order gets you something usable fastest and avoids the common trap of starting with the hardest part.

• Ten to fifteen works, catalogued properly. Not your whole output — a coherent set, with every field filled. A complete record of fifteen works is far more useful than a partial record of eighty.
• The exhibition history, oldest first, with venue and city. Do this while you can still check your own emails for the dates.
• The statement and the two biographies. Short one first; the long one is easier once the short one exists.
• Rights and credit, decided once and applied to everything, including the photographer credit you keep meaning to ask for.
• The contact route, and then actually test it from an address that is not yours.
• Only then, the newest work — which is the part you were going to start with, and the part that will still be there tomorrow.

keeping it from rotting

A dossier decays by default. The maintenance that keeps it honest is small and it is worth putting on a calendar rather than trusting to intention: add a work when it is finished, not when you next need it; add a show when it opens, while the details are in front of you; check once a year that every external link still resolves; and re-read the statement annually to see whether you would still sign it.

One rule underneath all of it: never publish a fact you have not checked. A wrong dimension, a misattributed photograph, a group show listed as a solo — those are the errors that get repeated by everyone who cites you afterwards, and correcting them later is far more work than getting them right once.