“Etched in Memory: Legacy Planning for Artists” is a web resource designed to assist artists in preparing for and protecting their professional legacy through sound planning and archival practices. All artists face the issue of building and maintaining their artistic reputations and creative output. Artists can assist their surviving partners, family and friends with decisions on financial issues and estates, as well as the disposition of their personal papers, business records and artwork.

Some of the resources found here are the result of a one-day symposium held in the Scholarly Communication Center (SCC) at Alexander Library on the College Avenue Campus of Rutgers in New Brunswick, on Friday, March 20, 2009.


Camille Billops
Artist, founding director of the Hatch-Billops Collection of Black Cultural Arts, New York, New York

Along with her husband James Hatch, Professor of English at CCNY, she is co-founder of the Hatch-Billops Archives of Black American Cultural History, a collection of visual materials, oral histories, and thousands of books chronicling black artists in the visual and performing arts. While Ms. Billops’s primary medium is sculpture, she has recently turned her eye to film making. In the last decade she has directed and produced “Suzanne, Suzanne,” “Older Women and Love,” “Finding Christa,” and “The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks.” Billops’s awards include a Fellowship from The Huntington Hartford Foundation in 1963, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in 1975, The International Women’s Year Award for 1975-6, and The James Van Der Zee Award, Brandywine Graphic Workshop, in 1994. Her works can be found in the permanent collections of the Studio Museum of Harlem, Photographers Gallery, London, and the Museum of Drawers, Bern, Switzerland. Since 1965, she has exhibited in one-woman and group exhibitions in venues worldwide, including Gallerie Akhenaton in Cairo; Kaohsiung Gallery in Taiwan; the Gimpel and Weitzenhoffer Galleries and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; and El Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia in Cali, Colombia.

Etched in Memory logo features Miriam Schapiro's "In the Land of Oo-bla-dee: Homage to Mary Lou Williams," 1993. Courtesy of the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions.

The original symposium was sponsored by the Institute for Women and Art (IWA) at Rutgers in partnership with the Rutgers University Libraries. The IWA operates under the auspices of the Office of the Associate Vice President for Academic & Public Partnerships in the Arts & Humanities. These events are made possible in part by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Etched in Memory Project Team included: Dr. Ferris Olin, Principal Investigator; Nicole Plett, Project Manager; Joe Namashe, Videographer; Ricki Sablove, Symposium Organizer; Katherine Scott, Symposium Organizer and Web Site Developer.