Biography Info and Display Bio

Biography

Biographical notes as well as the extensive biographies for acquisition justifications are entered as a text entry. Select “Artist Biography (Internal Use Only)” as the text type and paste formatted text into the text entry box. Date and author links are required to track the curator who has prepared this information.

Dates

Enter the artist’s birth and death dates into the Begin Search Date and End Search Date ISO date fields.  If you only know when an artist was active, enter those dates in the ISO field and add the term active to the display bio.

Nationality

This is a free text field. Add the nationality with capitalization in the adjective form (e.g., American, Italian, Mexican). This field can include multiple nationalities (German, American).

Display Bio

The Display Bio field predicts nationality and life dates, so it must be overwritten with BMA standard format manually as below. See the BMA Style Guide for additional examples.

Note that we use an en dash and not a hyphen here. This can be entered with a Mac device by holding option and the hyphen key. On windows devices, holding ALT followed by typing in the digits 0151 will create an en dash.  

The end dash should not have space on either side.

Examples

Karl Bodner (Riesbach, Switzerland, 1809–Barbizon, France, 1893)

Deborah Roberts (Austin, Texas, 1960–present)

Taller Torres-García (active 1944–1962)

Kathë Kollwitz Königsberg (Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia), 1867–Moritzburg, Germany, 1945)

Indianapolis, Indiana, 1997–Phoenix, Arizona, present

active Germany, 15th century