How to create a legacy: A workshop for artists and collectors

How to create a legacy

A searchable record of your work or collection, on your own laptop

One box, one sketch, one notebook at a time

A workshop for artists, collectors and estates, featuring: Pamela Belyea, M.Ed., co-founder, Gage Academy of Art

Tuesday, September 22, 2026 · 12pm to 2pm

Mercer Island Community & Event Center

Link: https://ivantohelpyou.com/art/workshop/how-to-create-a-legacy

Hi, I'm Ivan.

After taking about 10+ classes at Gage Academy of Art in the 2010s, I joined Gage co-founder Gary Faigin's still-life atelier during the pandemic. After Gary passed away last year, his widow and Gage co-founder Pamela Belyea was left with a catalog of Gary's work stored in an unsupported database from the early 2000s.

In a single day in early September, using the AI-powered database development techniques I've been building, I turned Gary's catalog into an open-source web app that runs on her own computer.

And now I'm holding a workshop where attendees will get to build their own catalogs using the same technology.

You'll get: A catalog of your own work or collection, started in the room, with a clear path to finish it.

• An application, not a spreadsheet. Search it, filter by medium, subject, size or year, and print a report you can hand to an insurer or an appraiser.
• On your computer, not on someone else’s server. Press Takeout and the whole thing comes with you. It is a file, so keep it in OneDrive or iCloud and it is backed up and on every device you use — without renting anything.
• Yours to keep. No subscription, no seat fee, no account to close. The code is open source if you ever want to take it further.
• Shaped to your work. Start from a template for art collections and change it by describing what you need — different fields, a second table, a report that didn’t exist before.
• Built for one person or one estate. Not enterprise software. This is for the artist, the collector, and the family sorting it out.

For the price of a workshop seat, you walk out with software you can use for a lifetime.

And it's software that lives on your own computer, doesn't train on your images, and just does its job without AI if you like, or with AI if you want to chat with your catalog.

So if you're working from a spreadsheet or from a stack of canvases in the corner, take the afternoon and join us for lunch on Mercer Island on Tuesday, Sept. 22.

Link: https://ivantohelpyou.com/art/workshop/how-to-create-a-legacy