Favianna Rodriguez has located herself at the intersection of art and social justice. She is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, a cultural organizer, and activist. Her art and practice address migration, gender justice, climate change, racial equity, and sexual freedom. Her work centers joy and healing, while challenging entrenched myths and dominant cultural practices. At CoLab, we regard Favianna as a tireless fighter and a force of nature.
When she first approached CoLab, she had been managing her online presence herself. She had initially built her website in HTML in 1999 and was using third party apps to show her work. “So at the beginning [of her association with CoLab], my need was a website that reflected the spectrum of my practice,” said Favianna. “The website had to differentiate me as a professional, longstanding artist who could carry out a variety of projects, from organizing with social justice movements to fulfilling large public art commissions.
“A lot of artists use templated platforms like Squarespace to create their websites, and these websites have limitations,” she continued. “But more importantly, using these platforms puts you at the mercy of providers who may go out of business.
“After almost 20 years, I realized that the DIY approach to my website was not going to work. At that point, I had at least 1000 works of art. I really needed a website that was customized to me as an artist, and could archive my artwork. Because increasingly, art is being viewed through a phone or through other digital means. So if I don’t have control over how my art is accessed, then I really don’t have control over my intellectual property. This is a big, big issue, so that’s why I went to CoLab.”
CoLab’s initial brief was to build a website with a customized database that displayed her art, made it possible for visitors to search for art in her archive, be educated by her art, and license it.
The value of what CoLab has built is incredible. I have a solid, stable, professional communication apparatus.
Favianna Rodriguez
Artist and activist
The discovery collaboration
“Because I had built websites for years, and had done a lot of research, I had a good understanding of what I needed. So I came to CoLab with my ideas, including building a database for my archive that was searchable by subject, that could handle large size files, and could work for my artistic approach as a print maker.
“Because there are times when I’ll have 20 versions of one art piece, I needed a very specific kind of database. The discovery process was focused on how to organize all the information that I had, everything from interviews to my resources for teachers and for social movements, as well as the art. We really had to think about the user experience. Working with CoLab was great, in the sense that they took my very clear ideas, and dug into the specificity of how they were going to be built.”
What we did
The first iteration of Favianna’s website included the home page, which offered a teaser of all of her work and projects, including links to her bio and her Instagram feed, and a number of doorways to enter her archive. CoLab also implemented a press page, a resources page, a videos page, the bio page, plus integrated the site with Favianna’s online store and her MailChimp account.
The site ran mostly on Python and used Django as its content management system.
“Over the years, we’ve added a blog, a public art page, a staff page, and a licensing page, but the core infrastructure started with that build in 2018.”
Technically, the most fun thing about the project is the art archive database; even Favianna’s CoLab team thinks it’s cool. Haystack is an open source framework for building, among other things, search systems that work with large document collections. Favi’s archive uses a Haystack search engine that lets users discover her artwork based on text input. The search parameters include an artwork’s title, description, content-type tags, and the year the art was published.
In addition, CoLab developed a custom, automated process for creating multiple sizes of each piece of art.
Along with providing regular maintenance for Favianna’s site, CoLab has worked with her over the years to solve such problems as making sure the technology scales with the increasing size of the database.
What was the result?
“The value of what CoLab has built is incredible. I have a solid, stable, professional communication apparatus. That is so important, because it is the number one way that people engage with me who want to hire me, such as art collectors, museums, and universities.
“It’s also the ease of mind the website creates that’s incredible. I’m 46 and I’ve been doing my art for 27 years, and my body of work is what will remain after I’m gone. We as artists are trained to think about where our intellectual property is going to live. I know that if anything happens to me, there are systems that live on a platform I own, that can be accessed by the people who are going to take care of my estate. For an artist, or poets and filmmakers, that is so important.”
