Behind the scenes: the state of the archive
We’re preparing the Art Days Forever website for a spring 2020 launch.
The design and structure of the website are in place as well as most categories of content. The priority at this time is to first publish selected work of photographer Zenta Dzividzinska and painter Juris Tifentals, accompanied by brief biographies. After that, over the summer and fall 2020, we will populate remaining sections of the website such as images of mementos from the artists’ home, information about their exhibitions, and images of their extensive book collection.
The artists’ daughter, New York-based art historian Alise Tifentale, has returned to Latvia for at least two years, 2020-2021, in order to sort out and document the archive. However, the time and resources are limited and sporadically available. Moreover, the archive is in a remarkably bad shape, as it has been kept in hastily arranged and inappropriate premises in two locations in Latvia. Countless photographs and negatives are damaged beyond repair as well as some paintings. Even during their lifetime, the artists never had the resources to properly store their work. Moreover, they never had a studio—during the Soviet times, that was a privilege of artists who were fully recognized by the official establishment. Dzividzinska and Tifentals did not follow that route, and as a result, they worked wherever they could, either in their bedroom of their Riga apartment (with Tifentals’ ageing mother in the other one) or in their bedroom/living room in their Iecava home. For these reasons, untangling their archive is a long-term task.
Please come back to the website again to see new content, or otherwise please follow Art Days Forever on Instagram to see all updates as they are posted.
Meanwhile, here are a few photos of the artists’ archive in one of the storage locations in spring 2020.