In Rachel Cusk’s 2014 novel Outline, the protagonist becomes known primarily through her dialogue with the people around her – strangers, friends and family – rather than direct characterization. At Soft Network, an exhibition devoted to the work and archives of Turkish-American photographer Sheyla Baykal enacts a similar sleight of hand through Baykal’s own photographs, archival ephemera and portraits by other artists. We come to know the East Village artist and ‘vital fringe figure’, as The New York Times critic Holland Cotter described her in 2000, through her community: a fuzzy, bejewelled outline.

No one wants to think about their legacy until it’s too late. Many artists dread the thought of organizing their archives, confronting the inevitable. Yet, art is supposed to outlast us – that’s one reason we make it.

“We would work for months at a time, and we would just sit on the floor of the storage room opening up bags and boxes,” said Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez, co-curator of the new exhibition “dearly Loved friends:” Photographs by Sheyla Baykal, 1965-1990 featuring the work of photographer Sheyla Baykal.

Known as “a community for reimagining artists’ legacies,” New York-based nonprofit Soft Network provides space for shared dialogue around this critical yet overlooked field and works to redress exclusions in art history.  

AFELL is just one outfit that has emerged in the past decade to help artists and their descendants ensure a future for their art. And as under-recognized artists get more and more attention within galleries and museums, these entities are increasingly important, working behind the scenes to help mount projects that would otherwise have been impossible.

The organization makes experimental and mixed-media works accessible to art lovers, curators and historians, chronicling elements of the art world that have for too long gone unseen.