Duration of care

The work Valise makes easier

Artworks have long lives. When they leave the studio, they are photographed, loaned, exhibited, sold, stored. They get damaged, reframed, rediscovered, recontextualized, inherited, remembered. To keep track of an artwork is to participate in that long life. It is a form of care.

Valise helps artists keep track of their artworks: the images, details, histories, locations, exhibitions, sales, press mentions, and notes that accumulate around a practice. It is software for the everyday recordkeeping that makes a career legible to oneself and to others.

Keeping a clean and complete record of your work helps you answer questions quickly, share information confidently, prepare for exhibitions, track sales and loans, revisit earlier bodies of work, and make sure the history of your practice does not depend on memory alone. Valise makes all that work calmer: no more hunting through folders, reconstructing details from old emails, or being uncertain about which version of a checklist is current.

We believe software for artists should be built with the same long horizon in mind. Today we’re launching Valise version 1.0 because the foundation Ross and I have built is sturdy enough to keep developing in public, alongside artists and the people who support them. We’re marking this moment with a commitment: to keep learning from, and better serving, everyone who uses this tool.

Where Valise comes from

Anyone who has maintained an artist’s archive knows this work: renaming the photographer’s DSCF_0376.tif, resizing those images, revising and resending a PDF checklist after one small error, trying to remember whether up-to-date information lives in a spreadsheet, an email, or a filename.

I know because I first did it at home: Valise builds on an enormous spreadsheet I built for my wife, Julia Dault, nearly fifteen years ago. What I learned helping her has been reinforced by my twenty-five years in the art world: working in galleries, writing criticism, editing magazines and books, organizing exhibitions, and directing a nonprofit gallery. But art-world knowledge alone could not make Valise. Ross brought the design and engineering experience, from tech giants to small startups, to translate artists’ needs into software that feels clear and reliable.

Ross and I met through Are.na, an artist-run platform whose point of view and sense of community we both admired. In fact, it was Ross who first suggested we turn the spreadsheet I had made for Julia into something better, something others could use too. The principle we settled on, and that has guided each of our decisions, is that Valise should help artists maintain their autonomy as they build their careers.

Duration of care

Recently, a friend of ours, Jon-Kyle Mohr, mentioned “duration of care” as one way to judge a software product. The phrase resonated because we are launching Valise at a strange moment for software. It has never been easier to produce something that looks like a product. But there is a difference between generating a tool and caring for one.

Ross and I share an affection for independent tools like Buttondown, Obsidian, Bear, iA Writer, and Things: software made by teams who sweat the details, own their choices, and treat users as people rather than numbers. They feel spiritually aligned with us: small enough to stay attentive, serious enough to endure.

Valise, most directly, represents three years of care: weekly meetings, long brainstorming walks, co-working sessions at public libraries, onboarding calls with users, and more than a thousand customer emails. But Valise also represents the longer arcs of our friendship, of Ross’s work in technology and design, and of my work in the art world.

We hope you’ll feel that accumulated care when you sign up, whether you’re an artist or working with or on behalf of one. Valise makes hard things feel calmer; the details are where you expect them to be. Care shows up in support replies, in sensible defaults, in the decision not to add something flashy because it would make the experience worse.

For Ross, care also means the work users should never have to think about: making pages load quickly, images behave predictably, imports and exports make sense, records stay consistent, and small interactions feel obvious. What you feel, if we’ve done it well, is trust: that the record of your work is in good hands.

Valise’s job is not to trap an artist’s career inside our product. Its job is to help artists make better records of their work, and to keep those records useful over time. We’ve priced Valise fairly so that you can maintain those records whether you’re emerging or established. The record matters more than the platform; the artist matters more than the software.

Artists have other options, from similar tools to simply using a spreadsheet and a Dropbox folder to, well, just winging it. What differentiates Valise from other options is the duration of care underpinning it, which actually runs in two directions. It’s not only our deep experience with artists and with technology, but also our principled commitment to maintaining Valise for the long haul. It’s why we published a longevity statement months before we asked users to begin paying for a subscription.

I’ve spent the last twenty-five years working with artists, writing about art, organizing exhibitions, editing publications, running a gallery, and living with an artist. I would be very happy to spend the next twenty-five helping artists through Valise.

Software, like an artwork’s life beyond the studio, is never finished. We’re just getting started. We are making good software, building trust with artists, and providing a tool that helps them navigate their careers with more confidence. We’ll celebrate your exhibitions, publications, sales, commissions, and studio breakthroughs from our home base in Toronto—and we’ll keep refining Valise so it can support all the work still to come.