“Anonymous artist,” “unknown artist,” “unidentified artist,” “artist unknown.”

Museums often use these phrases to acknowledge that they do not have a name recorded for an artist whose work is on view. Recently, however, cultural institutions have started using a new set of terms, “artist once known” and “maker once known.” As Michael Hartman from the Hood Museum of Art explains in a 2024 essay, “The difference is subtle but important. ‘Artist unknown’ suggests that an artist’s identity is unimportant and unrecoverable, whereas ‘artist once known’ implies that an artist was known and celebrated within their community.”

In other words, “once known” reminds us that every artwork was created by an individual who once held ties to a community—a person whose name was known to fellow artists, friends, and loved ones. This emphasis on “once” also challenges us to think about larger questions around memory, erasure, and archives. Whose names are preserved in history? Whose stories are left out?

These questions are particularly resonant when it comes to artworks created by Indigenous artists and artists of color. As Director of the National Gallery of Art Kaywin Feldman observed in a 2020 essay, “We now concede that early anthropologists and ethnographers who collected these objects were rarely interested in the identity of the individual or the people who made them.” And, as Myles Russell-Cook, curator of Indigenous art at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, has contended, museums are more likely to know the name and biography of the European who collected an object than that of the original maker.

Here at the Hudson River Museum, we are exploring how we might employ “artist once known” in relation to our own permanent collection, which contains thousands of objects for which we do not know the makers’ identities. That a majority of these objects are textiles and other forms of craft traditionally associated with women, people of color, and Indigenous artists only amplifies the issue at hand: how do we commemorate the work of marginalized artists while also acknowledging our own institutional gaps of knowledge?

Maker(s) once known
Blue-and-White “Deer and Crane” Yenyen Vase
Qing dynasty, Kangxi period, ca. 1662–1722
Porcelain
Collection of the Hudson River Museum
Gift of The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, Inc., 2007 (2007.07.11)

Take, for example, the antique ceramics featured in the recently opened Clay Conversations: Ceramics from the Gilded to the Digital Age. Many of the vessels on view fall under the category of “Kangxi porcelain”—so named after Emperor Kangxi, China’s longest reigning emperor and a champion of the arts. Kangxi porcelain was a highly prized export good and collected by American luminaries including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Henry Clay Frick, and John Pierpont Morgan. Many of these collectors later gifted their porcelain to museums, who now prominently feature their names in interpretative texts and labels.

But what about the names of the Chinese potters themselves? The makers who shaped the clay and developed the glazes? The artists who imagined intricate designs and carefully painted porcelain surfaces? We may no longer know their names, but many once did.

While “maker once known” does not remedy this loss, it draws important tensions to the surface. Confronted by the “once,” visitors might be pushed to consider the power structures inherent in artmaking and collecting and to question why certain names are recorded while others are relegated to the world of the “anonymous.” Hopefully, the terminology might even be part of a larger swell to generate new research into identifying artists who were once known and whose contribution to the arts should continue to be celebrated.

Karintha Lowe
Mellon Public Humanities Fellow