In 2009, I was two years into my tenure as a museum employee, managing a collection of small exhibition brochures, pamphlets and gallery announcements at the National Gallery of Art Library. That summer, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith reported on a phenomenon I had also observed in my capacity as Reference Librarian for Vertical Files: the decline of the printed gallery post card. Smith's ArtsBeat blog post, ‘Gallery Card as Relic,’ is a breezy elegy surveying recent “final notice” cards mailed from commercial galleries that were “going green” by eliminating paper mailings. I, however, was feeling less light-hearted about the demise of what Smith describes as a “useful bit of art-world indicator…[and] an indispensable constant creatively deployed by artists, avidly cherished by the ephemera-obsessed and devotedly archived by museums.”
Leading the NATIONAL GALLERY of ART during COVID-19