Jo Ann & Roland spent their summers traveling across the USA documenting Outsider Art.
It started with a photo album and typed note cards. Each documented artist came with location and interview notes, photos of their art and a bibliography.
I wanted the website to have the look 'n feel of an art magazine.
I decided the best way to deal with a huge amount of photos of unknown sizes and loads of content was to use Gatsbyjs and Airtable to process it.
Gatsbyjs dealt with images and the GraphQL meant that I could query only the data I needed for each page.
Airtable provided easy to use forms to allow others to enter data that offered a visual rich text field to Markdown the text. It also was quite easy to Markdown the text rich fields from Airtable using Gatsbyjs mapping.
Each artist page features a photo gallery lightbox, bio and bibliography that is created dynamically based on the artist name via Gatsbyjs page creator.
The final challenge is digitizing all the photos and notes from the many albums Roland and Jo Ann put together over the years. I've only managed to digitize the album for North Carolina.