Claire Shaffer, Fall 2022

40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks

This fall semester, I worked with NYU MIAP Fellow Mike Stetz (MIAP ‘22) on creating a new cataloging system and organizing Spike Lee’s extensive memorabilia collection, housed in the offices of his production company 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. At the start of my internship, Mike and I identified the collection management system CatalogIt as the best fit for the collection; after meeting with representatives from the application over Zoom, we created an account for 40 Acres and began adding in items for the collection. We also migrated existing collection entries from 40 Acres’ previous CMS, Past Perfect, with the generous help of the CatalogIt software developers. Much of my internship was spent either adding new entries for items into the system or cleaning up existing entries that had been migrated from Past Perfect. As part of this cataloging project, I also took photos of objects in the collection; helped create a building map for the 40 Acres offices with numbered locations for each floor, room, and wall within the building; and researched labeling materials for objects hanging on the wall.

Additionally, Mike and I successfully received back several items that had been on loan at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles for an exhibit on Spike Lee. Those items were shipped back to a 40 Acres storage facility in Manhattan, where they were inventoried and sorted, with some being sent back to the Fort Greene offices. We also spent several more days in the storage unit and did some additional inventorying of the other items already there, consolidating boxes and just generally tidying the place up so that it could be used to store more items in the future. Finally, we began communications with curators from an institution that is planning a retrospective exhibit on Lee next fall.