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News5 February, 2025
Weeks to Launch: 4
Welcome back to another issue of the AOPA-Retrospective Launch 1.0 newsletter! We’re officially a month into 2025, and we here at AOPA are hard at work in anticipation of the platform’s reveal.
Last time, I introduced you to the Exhibition Single page where an artist’s works can be viewed by their exhibitions. But what about the other ways their oeuvre can be categorized?
Can artworks be grouped by those elements as well?
The answer is “yes” and is found in the Taxonomy Main and Taxonomy Single pages! Allow me to explain.
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Screen Capture showing the Taxonomy Themes Main Page of artist Karen Trask’s retrospective.
Screen Capture of Karen Trask’s Taxonomy Single Page for the theme Undoing the Printed Word.
It’s not as obscure as it seems! Taxonomy is just computer-world jargon. Don and Valeriu use it all the time. Alex, APOA’s designer, even started to use it. And I’m getting used to it too!
It is a word in data science that was borrowed from biology for classifying things based on shared characteristics. For AOPA, it’s pretty simple.
AOPA-Retrospective 1.0 has three built-in Taxonomies:
If you have others, they can be created.
Graphic showing WordPress Admin interface showing list of Artforms, Themes (Karen Trask) and Genres.
All taxonomies have taxonomy items. Here is a sampling of the Taxonomy Items from the first two taxonomies (you can also see them in the screen capture above); they’re built into AOPA-Retrospective.
As for Artwork Themes, those are unique to each artist. The Dedicated Curator can collaborate with the artist to help distill out what these could be.
AOPA-Retrospective takes its name from our belief that an artist’s oeuvre can be digitally organized as if it was being shown in a physical retrospective exhibition.
There are two types of pages in AOPA-Retrospective 1.0 that provide this organisation:
To elaborate on the exhibition comparison… The Taxonomy Main page acts like an exhibition map showing the different thematic galleries. This “map” allows visitors to orient themselves and choose the path they would like to take through the retrospective.
Graphic showing a museum floorplan overlaid on the Taxonomy Main Page from Karen Trask’s website.
Each of the the Taxonomy Item pages correspond to the gallery rooms in the exhibition, showing the artworks that are classified in that grouping.
Graphic showing overlay of artwork tiles from Karen Trask’s Grief Theme Taxonomy Item page.
Each gallery on the Taxonomy Item Pages is a dedicated space that invites consideration and appreciation of some aspect of an artist’s oeuvre. It’s where visitors/users, and even the artist can trace connections between artworks, sometimes in unforeseen ways!
Graphic collage showing Karen Trask’s Taxonomy Single Sculpture page collaged into the storage racks of a museum. exhibition page
In a physical exhibition the artworks can only be grouped in one way; a painting can’t be in two galleries at once. The online retrospective does not have this limitation. The same works presented by Themes can also be grouped in galleries by Art Forms and Genres.
Let’s go back to thinking about curators, critics, art historians and collectors, or “CCACs” for this. By displaying artworks by Art Form or Genre, CCACs can browse an artist’s oeuvre based on their particular needs.
For example, a curator who is preparing an exhibition dedicated to craft materials can navigate to an artist’s Ceramic, Textile Art and Weaving Taxonomy Item pages to see all the artist’s works using those mediums. Similarly, an art historian pursuing in-depth research on Feminist Art or Landscape can go to those Genre Taxonomy Item pages. Or say there’s a collector seeking the perfect piece to complete their collection of watercolours… You get the idea.
Sorting works this way allows CCACs to easily focus in on an artist’s exploration of a given Art Form, Genre or Theme, and even see their evolution over time, because the artworks are ordered chronologically.
So, you see why Taxonomies are such a big deal? Okay! Now let’s see how these pages navigate.
Let’s imagine that you’re browsing an artist’s Artwork Themes Taxonomy Single page and a theme called Nature and the City piques your interest. By clicking on that theme, you enter the Nature and the City Taxonomy Item Single page. This page shows all of the artist’s works that are tagged with “Nature and the City”.
Once there, all of the artworks in Nature and the City are displayed as thumbnail images. When hovering over an artwork’s thumbnail, you can open a continuous, full-screen slideshow that lets you browse through all the images and video documentation for that piece and all the other Nature and the City artworks. Hovering over an artwork’s thumbnail also gives you the option of clicking through to its Artwork Single page for a more in-depth look.
As always, everything comes back to the art!
Check out this video tour that navigates through the Taxonomy pages, the a Taxonomy Item slideshow and link to the artowork page.
Video showing navigation of the Taxonomy pages, taxonomy item slideshow and link to artwork page
Graphic illustrating the connections between artwork, its exhibition history, the exhibition and its taxonomy items drawn from the artworks
Let’s go deeper into the interconnected navigation that AOPA-Retrospective creates.
Earlier, the Nature and the City Taxonomy Item page took us to the Artwork Single page. As we saw last week, the Artwork Single page’s Exhibition History lists all of the exhibitions that a work was shown in, allowing us to click through to an exhibition of interest. On the Exhibition Single page, we can see the Themes of the works in that exhibition… which can take us to a different Taxonomy Item that we started with, and so on!
Essentially, all of these connections go both ways to make browsing natural. You can go from an Artwork Theme Taxonomy Single page to an artwork, to an exhibition, all the way to another art form… and back again!
It might not be obvious to you how all Taxonomy-Related pages are actually created. It is quite simple, the AOPA-Retrospective templates do all the heavy lifting.
The Dedicated Curator or artist just has to go to the administrative interface for an Artwork, and select the appropriate Themes, Artforms and Genres for that piece using simple checkboxes.
When these Taxonomy Items are selected, they are automatically added to AOPA-Retrospective’s beautifully designed Taxonomy Main page, with links to the Taxonomy Item pages. Likewise, the Taxonomy Item pages, showing all its artworks in the Taxonomy Item, are magically added to the website,
with all the related artworks in place.
Graphic showing how checking “Collage” in an artwork, goes through Retrospective’s code to create the Collage Taxonomy Item page
In some cases, you may not want to make a big deal of one of the Taxonomies built into your AOPA-Retrospective. For example, if you work exclusively with oil paints or installations, there wouldn’t be a need for an Art Form Taxonomy Main page with only that one item.
In AOPA-Retrospective 1.0’s Preferences, you can decide whether or not you want the Art Form, Genre or Theme pages to be published. If not, all links and navigation to these are removed. The Taxonomy Items are still listed in Artwork and Exhibition metadata, they are just not clickable.
Plus, this can always be changed later to suit your needs. With a click of a button, your Taxonomy pages are there. Easy-peasy!
Graphic showing a screen capture of Retrospective’s Preferences and the Taxonomy metadata from an artwork showing linked and not linked Taxonomy Items.
Graphic showing the Private Gallery Taxonomy admin interface still in the clouds.
As we wrap up, I want to let you in on a rumour I heard from Don. Word on the street is that he’s thinking of adding a Private Gallery Taxonomy to AOPA-Retrospective.
He said that Taxonomy Items could be things like “Selection for Museum Curator” or “Works I want to show that buyer I met at the opening”. This would allow artists to make a private gallery with the works they would like to show to a specific curator, critic, art historian or collector. Then, a link to the page could be sent out for the recipient to review — like a personal gallery visit!
So… What do you think? Is this a good idea?
I can’t tell you the number of times I have wanted to do a deep dive into an artist’s works on a particular theme or in a select medium, only to have to browse one long list of artworks and manually pluck out the ones that were relevant to me. As we’ve seen, AOPA-Retrospective 1.0 makes browsing an artist’s oeuvre easy by making ample connections between works, inviting all kinds of art appreciation.
Thanks for spending another week with us! It’s always a pleasure to share these updates. Every week, I hope you can picture the AOPA-Retrospective 1.0 platform a little more clearly… and get a lot more excited for the launch!
Feel free to get in touch with any questions or feedback. You can shoot us a message over at our contact page. We love hearing from you!
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Mya Fernandes-Giles, AOPA Dedicated-Curator Assistant
Master’s student in Art History at Concordia University, working on a project that relies heavily on alternative archives. Has a great appreciation for record-keeping and cultural preservation, especially amongst little-known artists and communities. Recipient of the Concordia Merit Scholarship, the Guido Molinari Prize in Studio Arts and the Sarah Leaney Award in Ceramics and Fibers.
Artist Online Presence and Archiving (AOPA), provides professional online archiving and web-development services to mid- to late-career contemporary visual artists. AOPA was founded in 2023. It grew out of the freelance work of Don Goodes, who was an art critic and curator in Canada for a decade before moving over to web development in the cultural sector. AOPA delivers its services via a growing team of freelance writers, curators and designers spread across Canada. Over the past 2 years, the core team has been developing a flexible and comprehensive online platform called AOPA-Retrospective, a key tool in delivering AOPA’s services. AOPA-Retrospective is designed to fulfill the needs of contemporary artists, for both archiving and the online presentation of their oeuvre in the spirit of the catalog-raisonné.
For questions or inquiries see our contact page. We would love to hear from you.
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