Gaetano Zampogna Artist Archive

My father, Gaetano Zampogna, has painted for five decades. I replaced his WordPress site with an artist archive that lets visitors explore the work through a public curator and gives Gaetano a private conversational studio for maintaining it.

I designed and built the archive end to end: the migration, agent experiences, approval workflow, research and writing systems, and launch. That describes the scope of my contribution, not a different role title.

The old site depended on a content management system my father was not going to maintain himself. Catalogue gaps therefore stayed open, and each addition depended on someone else. The rebuild also had to preserve existing writing and old links, distinguish drafted text from the artist’s own words, and keep unreviewed changes out of the public archive.

I migrated the catalogue while preserving its existing prose, then checked the old addresses against the live site. To research missing details, the studio agent reads family material from a shared Google Drive and scanned catalogues. OCR makes the scans searchable, followed by page-by-page review. A matcher links candidate material to catalogue works; I checked it against 164 works matched by hand. One register keeps open questions from being asked twice or lost, while a completeness score shows which gaps remain.

For works without text, I rebuilt the writing register after the first pass sounded wrong, then judged the rewrites against my father’s own writing. The resulting texts are labelled as drafts, not attributed to him.

I migrated and checked all 314 catalogue items, confirmed that all 1,222 old addresses still lead to the right page or picture (tested live on 4 October 2026), and drafted texts for the 186 works that had none, at a cost of $8.45 for the final set.

The low cost of generating text was not the hard part. The harder job was making its authorship clear and keeping the artist in control of publication. I also learned to review streamed answers as they arrive: a response can be correct at the end and still be confusing on the way there.

• Every screen is checked at widths from 320 to 1,280 px.
• Motion follows the visitor’s reduced-motion setting: fades remain, while other motion is removed.
• Pictures carry alt text in Italian and English.
• The site follows the visitor’s language, including technique names.

I tested two ways of building the archive’s stories. Generating chapter by chapter failed in 9 of 10 runs. Fetching the relevant works first, then writing, failed in none of 16 runs. I chose the retrieval-first workflow based on those tests.