The Rescue Station Archive serves as a resource for artists and their relatives to preserve and share documents related to an artist’s career after their passing. From years of experience, it has become evident that while family members often retain and pass down artwork, crucial documents, such as articles, exhibition records, and professional correspondence, are frequently discarded or overlooked. This archive ensures that such materials are preserved, providing a historical record of the artist and their work for future reference by appraisers, archivists, and researchers.
Our archive also connects to larger institutional archives, which may hold more comprehensive collections of an artist’s records, either before or after their passing. Many of these institutional archives are not easily accessible through a standard Google search unless the user is familiar with advanced research tools. For instance, a general search like "Texas sculptors from the 1980s" would not retrieve these resources effectively.
Additionally, local newspaper archives and other publications often do not document an artist’s exhibition history outside their immediate region. This archive helps bridge that gap by consolidating exhibition records and related materials from various locations.
Rescue Station also provides a platform for temporarily or permanently posting documents from before 1996, when the internet was not yet widely used for institutional archiving. Many historical records remain offline, and while tools like the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive 1996) was launched by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat help retrieve lost web content in 2001, but they do not cover pre-internet materials. By maintaining these archives, Rescue Station contributes valuable historical resources that can aid researchers, writers, and even Wikipedia contributors in documenting artists’ legacies.