An artist estate is a long-term stewardship project. Every work needs a defensible provenance, every exhibition and publication needs to be preserved, and every loan and sale needs to leave the archive stronger, not thinner. Aurelian is the workspace built for that discipline.
Where it hurts today
Studio ledgers, hand-annotated slides, correspondence in filing cabinets. Every reference is one house move away from being lost.
The scholarly record is being built in Word documents and Excel sheets. Version control is by filename. Contributor access is by email attachment.
Museum loans, image licensing, exhibition permissions — negotiated one email at a time, tracked in nobody's calendar.
What Aurelian gives you
Every work catalogued with authorship, dating, provenance, exhibitions, publications and current location. Structured for scholarly use and public reference.
Every prior owner, transfer and sale logged with supporting documents. The chain is unbroken and defensible in perpetuity.
Museum loans, image licences and exhibition permissions tracked with terms, dates and reproduction rights.
Scholars, archivists and family principals contribute with role-scoped access. Every edit is versioned and attributed.
How it flows
Existing archives digitised and structured. Correspondence, exhibition ephemera and studio records attached to the works they reference.
Catalogue raisonné entries drafted, cross-referenced, and reviewed by named contributors.
Loans, licences, publications and sales logged against the works as they occur. The archive grows, never shrinks.
Public-facing catalogue raisonné and licensing portals generated from the same canonical record — no parallel systems to maintain.
Questions
Yes. Aurelian is used by foundations and estates as the operational infrastructure for CR projects, with contributor roles, versioning and citation support.
Each work carries its own licensing state and reproduction terms. Requests are tracked with terms and approvals, and issued licences are attached to the record.
That is the design goal. Full export as structured data, no lock-in on the archive itself, and clear succession of custodianship without loss of history.
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