Why Every Creator Needs an Archive—Before It’s Too Late

What does it mean to preserve your creative legacy?

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Artist Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, now showing at the Brooklyn Museum

Last week, I went to see the Brooklyn Museum’s new exhibit of the work of Nancy Elizabeth Prophet.

Born in 1890, Prophet—an Afro-Indigenous artist—was the first Black person to graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design. She was part of a wave Black artists and intellectuals who moved to Paris in the 1920s in pursuit of creative freedom and possibility abroad. She developed the fine arts program at Spelman College, corresponded with W. E. B. Du Bois, and became known for her emotional, often haunting busts and figures.

And yet, despite her talent and influence, she never achieved her dream of having a solo exhibit dedicated to her work. Until now, sixty-five years after her death.

That we are able to see an exhibit of Prophet’s work now, is only because of the work she did to preserve it when she was alive: through photographs, letters, diaries, and of course the sculptures themselves.

Prophet’s self-archiving, the curators explained when I saw the exhibit last week, is not uncommon for women artists and artists of color, who are less likely to be celebrated in life, and less likely to have someone else in their life (for example, a wife) to do that archiving for them.

It made me think of a Black woman artist of our own time, Beyoncé, who famously maintains a digital archive spanning decades of her work - videos, interviews, music, handwritten notes, behind-the-scenes footage. It’s a private, meticulously maintained record of her career, curated by herself for herself, as if she is her own biographer. This archive has already been mined and repurposed inside Beyoncé’s creative process, in projects like Lemonade, Homecoming, and her 2018 On The Run II tour with Jay-Z.

Beyoncé is one of the most celebrated artists of our time, but it is still she who must take the initiative of preserving her own legacy. Of deciding that the work she does matters, and deserves to be kept a record of, so that others can refer to it in the future.

Reflecting on Prophet and Beyoncé, I thought about what a beautiful act of self-respect these acts of keeping record and preservation were. How they were a way of declaring that one’s work mattered, even if the world around them suggested otherwise. And indeed, even someone as famous as Beyoncé might have been reduced to a mere “pop star” if she hadn’t taken her story and legacy into her own hands.

Beyoncé maintains an archive that contains almost every performance, photoshoot, and interview she’s ever done.

I have always been drawn to other people’s ephemera. When I was in high school, I sometimes spent whole afternoons going through my friends’ papers with them - old report cards, notes passed in class - laughing together about the person they revealed beneath. We would share each other's paper diaries as a way of saying, “This is me.” It’s the same fascination that led me to spend hours poring over Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules exhibit in my twenties - captivated by the letters, ticket stubs, drawings, and papers he had preserved.

Their acts of self-archiving made me wonder what I might include if I were to create an archive of my own work. Not just the polished pieces - the published articles, the bound books - but the scribbled notes and half-finished songs, the artifacts that feel most alive.

It might include:

• My books and journalism, spanning over two decades of writing and storytelling.

• Songs I wrote as a teenager.

• Old notebooks, pages scrawled with ideas that never made it past the margins but still feel alive with potential.

• Video recordings of The Sex Myth play in New York, where I saw my words and ideas come to life on stage.

• Books and scripts I wrote as a teenager, some ambitious, others half-finished, but all holding something of what I cared about at the time.

• Images and invitations from salons I’ve run, ephemeral moments of connection and conversation.

• Emails shared with my blogger friends in the early 2010s, threads of dialogue from a community that mattered intensely.

• Journals and personal notes, not meant for anyone but me, but still part of the record.

But the difficulty of capturing and preserving all that work, across multiple mediums, is daunting.

Before I left Australia fifteen years ago, I had my favorite articles in my portfolio scanned and digitized, but I don’t know where they are now. I kept paper copies of most of the magazines I had written for in storage for a couple of years, but most of them ended up in the recycling a couple of years later when I cleared the storage unit out. Then there are the countless digital articles I have written for outlets that have since closed, or moved their archives to a different server and stripped my bylines from them.

My old blog is preserved in the archive of the National Library of Australia, and I have a box in my basement of memorabilia from the last ten years. A copy of my first book signed by people I met on every stop on my book tour. A galley marked up with my own edits. Many, if not all, of my songs sit in my own iTunes library, and I think I still have paper copies of most of them, somewhere in a purple 90s-style ring folder.

But there is so much that once mattered to me—that still matters to me—that I no longer know the location of, or if it even still exists. The bright orange poster I ripped down from a wall denouncing the student magazine I edited at the time. Student campaign t-shirts from now-real and disgraced politicians. Articles I poured my heart into for publications that have since folded or forgotten me, my byline erased by a server migration or a site redesign. Old zines made in my bedroom, photocopied and stapled together, distributed by hand. Stories I wrote as a child, buried in some forgotten box or lost in the folds of memory.

This is true of most of us who create, I imagine. That our paper (or digital) trail of our own work is only partial. That we don’t have a full handle on our own stories.

Creating an archive, I think, is an act of love. To ourselves, to the work we’ve done, and to the people who might come across it someday.

My mother understood that. When she passed away last year, my husband found a box in her wardrobe marked Rachel. Inside it lay laminated copies of my first couple of years of newspaper articles, posters from my student union campaign, some old fifth-grade assignments, a magazine cover story about my first book preserved in a plastic slip.

One of many items my mum kept in her archive of all things “Rachel.”

While I didn’t always feel my mother understood me, she was always watching; always trying. That box was her way of saying: Your work matters.

Creating an archive, I think, is an act of self-respect. A way of declaring that what you’ve made matters, even if the world hasn’t always seen it. Even if it’s just for you. To build one is to claim your place in history, to leave a record of the ideas, art, and moments that shaped you.

So, if you were to create an archive of your own work, what would you include? What would you preserve, if only for yourself? What would you want someone to stumble across, decades from now, and find themselves captivated by?

Let me know in the comments below.

Until next time,

Rachel