E-book 'Hidden Heritage: Visegrad Artists' Estates and Archives'

We invite you to read the publication 'Hidden Heritage: Visegrad Artists' Estates and Archives', which was created as part of the Hidden Visegrad Heritage: Artists' Studios On-Line project.
The e-book is one of the outcomes of a conference devoted to the broadly understood issues related to the care of private archives of artists, which took place on October 24, 2024.
The subject of particular concern for researchers, archivists, and cultural institutions should currently be, above all, materials created and collected by artists born in the 1930s and 1940s. These are the most vulnerable to dispersion and destruction, as their creators do not always have the opportunity to pass on their artistic achievements to anyone. It should also be noted that the most important sources of information about these resources, about the materials and works collected in them, are their creators, who are almost organically connected with them. Unless we preserve their knowledge, we will lose a valuable cultural resource.
The English term “estate” has no equivalent in meaning in Polish, for example. Instead, we usually use the imprecise term “archive,” which originally did not refer to a collection in the hands of a private individual. This peculiar terminological gap indicates that the problem of artistic legacies requires consideration and work. It requires it in general, and in Central and Eastern Europe in particular.
It is only relatively recently that such resources have been recognized in our region as an important element of the cultural field. As part of the “Hidden Heritage...” project, we archive materials held by artists or their heirs, digitize them, and make them available online, but we also look at the places where they are stored, seeing them as important points on the cultural map of our region. We also strive to exchange experiences in the field of working with this type of material, develop the best methods of handling the objects, but also the stories associated with them.

In our publications, we try to answer the following questions:
– how to permanently and effectively secure a given resource;
– how to support artists and their heirs in the process of preserving these resources;
– how best to document their storage locations and care for them as valuable cultural resources;
– whether we can develop our own adequate terminology for them.
Authors:
Kata Balázs, Polana Bregantová, Katarína Bajcurová, Markéta Čejková, Gabriela Garlatyová, Richard Kitta, Róna Kopeczky, Tomas Marusiak, Luiza Nader, Jana Písaříková, Agnieszka Popiel, Tomasz Popiel, Wiktoria Szczupacka
Editor: Marika Kuźmicz
Collaboration: Adam Parol
Design and layout: Kacper Greń
Proofreading: Barry Keane

The project is co-financed by the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from the International Visegrad Fund. The fund's mission is to promote the idea of sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.

The e-book is available here:
hidden_heritage_visegrad_artists_2025_spreads.pdf