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News16 September, 2026
Welcome back, dear readers. While things slowed down for the summer, we have no shortage of exciting updates to share.
Version 1.1 of the AOPA-Retrospective platform is approaching the finish line with many new features; more on that below. Once it’s done, we’ll be well positioned to take on new clients — and really get the Catalogue Raisonné Collective into motion!
Oh, and did I mention that the Collective has gathered six promising new members?
So read on for news on our most recent AOPA patron, how the Catalogue Raisonné Collective is taking form and features being added to AOPA-Retrospective 1.1.
Have a friend who’s interested in keeping up with the Catalogue Raisonné Collective? New readers can sign up here.
Don and Mylène.
To begin, I’d like to announce that we have a new AOPA Gold patron: Mylène Boisclair. She is a veteran physiotherapist working in rehabilitation who has also developed her own effective brand of breathing and energy work to rebalance the body. Wow! I’m in.
Mylène is a family friend and has always been very supportive of Don’s work. She’s the kind of person that Don can call up and talk at length about business developments, and who always lends an open ear. Thank you, Mylène, for your continued support!
You’ll remember our patrons featured in previous newsletters: Doug Sigurdson, Brian Mirtle, and Brad and Marciela Galitiuk. They helped finance the vital updates to the platform you will read about below. Thanks again to them!
Interested in joining our star-studded list of donors? Every little bit helps.
It means the world to see AOPA’s work being acknowledged, appreciated, and so concretely supported. It is a great encouragement, and a reminder to keep pushing to deliver the high-quality work our patrons have gone out of their way to sustain.
Thank you to everyone!
In late May, AOPA put out a call to independent curators, critics, researchers and art historians interested in learning more about the Catalogue Raisonné Collective. We were thrilled by the positive response.
Slide from the Catalogue Raisonné Collective meet-up.
Don hosted two remote information sessions on June 4th (in English) and June 5th (in French), introducing AOPA and the Collective. (See links to videos below)
In total, seventeen arts professionals from across the country and overseas attended. The seasoned group of practicing critics, curators and historians, as well as specialized graduate students from several Canadian universities, expressed their interest, asked great questions and provided their insights, all of which will be taken into account as the Collective advances.
There are already some potential matches between artists interested in producing their catalogues raisonnés and our pioneering Collective members, who would act as dedicated curators for those artists. But next steps depend on the launch of Retrospective 1.1. Read on…
Video capture of the English Catalogue Raisonné Collective meet-up, June 3, 2026
Enregistrement de la séance d’information pour le Collectif du catalogue raisonné, 4 juin 2026
If you or someone you know is an arts professional interested in expanding an independent curatorial, critical or art-historical practice, we invite you/them to consider joining the Catalogue Raisonné Collective by filling out the form linked below (alternately, you can just get in touch with Don).
The CRC provides community, shared resources, professional support, and an efficient way to develop meaningful artist-focused projects. It can also represent an additional source of income for independents.
Work on AOPA-Retrospective 1.1 continues. Since we last spoke, Don and Valeriu have made major strides in realizing Don’s vision for 1.1.
For AOPA-Retrospective 1.1 we went back through version 1.0 with a fine-tooth comb to ensure that the platform can capture all the data needed to represent a wide range of artistic practices. Here is a sampling of what they’ve accomplished.
Screen capture of updates to Grants and Awards.
The AOPA production team completely reworked the data fields and template programming for Grants and Awards.
Changes include:
All of these changes support capturing all history related to grants and awards, from application to acquisition. Great work!
Screen capture of the Artist CV page, showing the “CV Library”.
The CV on the artist’s About page is already comprehensive. The main sections are generated automatically, drawing data from the exhibitions, publications, collections and grants entered in the archive. But artists often have many versions of their CVs, each representing the different facets of their career: public art, grant applications, teaching, writing, etc.
Enter the new “CV Library”! It’s just a line, but is rich in content. PDF versions of the artist’s CV can now be uploaded and links added, creating a robust and flexible list of all relevant CVs.
Way to go Don and Valeriu!
Artist CV page, showing the “Collections” section with the new “Artworks in the Collection” icons and hover state with the artwork title.
Sticking with the CV, now let’s look at changes in Collections. The platform generates a list of collections in which the artist is represented. This is standard for artist CV’s, but we wanted to make it easy to find which artworks are in which collection.
This interconnectedness of content is a core feature of AOPA’s Retrospective platform. So we:
Montage showing the Artwork count on the “All Artworks”, “Video Art” art form and “Exhibition” pages.
This is a simple but very useful feature that will be found on any page where there are lists of artworks. It is a tally showing the number of works in the group. It saves us counting the number of thumbnails if we want to, for example:
Next!
This one was really sorely missing. On the “All Artworks” page in version 1.0, the thumbnail was way too small to get a decent idea of what the artwork looked like. The only way to see a good-sized image of the artworks was to click on the miniature thumbnail, leave the page and load the artwork page. Not great.
Well now, I’m sure you will be as happy as I am that we can launch a slideshow with all the documentation of an Artwork right from the “All Artworks” page. This is a particularly great upgrade for researchers. Thanks Don and Valerieu!
Montage showing a slideshow being launched when the user clicks on an artwork thumbnail on the All Artworks page.
While I’m thinking of it, I’ll mention another feature that’s been added to slideshow captions, this time everywhere on the site.
Say you are browsing a slideshow of the artworks in an exhibition. You come across one that intrigues you and you want to check it out. Well, now there is a link in the caption that lets you go directly to the artwork page, where we can find out everything about that work. Interconnected!
Screen capture of the caption for an artwork in the slideshow showing the icon linked to the current artwork.
We had to solve another critical problem for 1.1. This one related to artwork dimensions.
In 1.0, the unit of measurements (centimetres or inches) for artwork dimensions was selected in the AOPA-Settings. Once set, it could be easily forgotten which system was being used. This especially posed a problem, when more than one person was entering data. 100 cm is not 100 inches! It was a mess.
No more!
The result: data entry is more efficient, and miscommunication impossible.
Animation showing the automatic conversion from CN to IN in the Height and Width fields for an artwork in the admin interface.
When he was first doing the data design for the “Legacy” section for Artworks, Don consulted Sarah Greenberg Morse, a NYC based art + estate advisory specialist.
She was very helpful and pointed out that bequeathing an artwork to a collection is a process. It happens in stages and having a way to manage that process would add substantial value to AOPA-Retrospective.
So, Valeriu and Don made it happen. In 1.1:
I guess you could call it a beneficiary management tool. This information is displayed on the artwork page for logged-in users. Kudos to Don and Val!
Artwork admin interface showing rows for two Potential Beneficiaries with their status.
Artwork web page showing the private information for a confirmed beneficiary.
That’s just a sampling of changes to expect in 1.1. We are currently working on the intricacies of dealing with artwork series and multi-work installations. We aim to have AOPA-Retrospective 1.1 completed by late fall. Can’t wait until the launch.
Once done, we will shift our focus to matching Collective members with artists. Then things will really get interesting.
Phew… Maybe summer here at AOPA has been busy after all!
Thank you again, as always, for reading, and don’t be shy to get in touch.
Mya Fernandes-Giles, AOPA Dedicated-Curator Assistant
Masters of Art History from Concordia University. Completed an SSHRC-funded thesis 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 SSHRC, FRQSC (in title), 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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