title: “Places: where a work hangs”

Places: where a work hangs

The artwork Location used to be a text box. That is how one wall ends up recorded as “Main gallery, east wall”, “east wall” and “E wall” — three answers to one question, which means the two questions you actually have cannot be answered at all:

What is on the east wall?
What is hanging nowhere?

So a place is now a thing your gallery keeps, and a work points at one.

Choosing where a work hangs

On the artwork form, Where it hangs lists your gallery’s places.

Nowhere yet is a real choice. A piece in the store room, or one just taken down, is not on a wall and should not pretend to be.
+ Add a place creates one without leaving the form — you tend to notice a wall is missing at exactly the moment you need it. The new place is selected for you, since that is why you added it.

Recording where many pieces hang, in one pass

Editing a few hundred pieces one at a time is not something anyone will do, so:

Artwork Catalog → tick the pieces (Select all shown takes everything the filters are showing; filter by artist first to do one artist’s work).
Set place… (it is always visible and tells you to select something first).
Choose a place, or No place yet (clear it), and press Apply.

Up to 200 pieces go in each step and the screen does that for you, so 461 pieces is three steps and one click. Afterwards it tells you how many were placed, and names every piece it left alone with the reason (for example, a piece recorded as off the gallery floor, an archived piece, or a work whose artist has left).

The place does not have to be drawn on your floor plan: this records where a piece is, for the pick list. (Putting pieces on a drawn wall is a separate step, Artwork Catalog → What hangs where.) Setting a place never changes whether a piece can be sold or whether it shows on your website.

A piece with no place recorded is a normal state. Its row in the catalog says No place recorded quietly; it is not an error.

A retired place is not offered here and is refused for any new piece. A piece already on a retired place keeps it, and its edit form still shows it, marked (retired).

Managing your places

Find them under Artwork Catalog → Places. The list shows how many works are on each place, with In use and Retired side by side so a wall that is out of service is still visible.

A place has a name (“East wall”), an optional area for when a name alone is ambiguous (“Upstairs”, “Back room”), and optional notes for the person carrying the piece (“behind the desk, low light”), and an Order number. Lower numbers come first in the picker and on the printed pick list, so number your places in the order you walk the room.

The list shows how many works are on each place, so a wall with nothing on it is visible at a glance.

Two things you cannot do by accident:

The same name twice. “East wall” and “east wall” are one place, not two — that is the entire point, and a second one is refused with a message rather than quietly created.
Lose art by removing a place. Deleting a place never deletes the works that were on it. They become “hangs nowhere”, which is true and actionable. If you only want a wall out of the picker — it is being rebuilt, the plinth is in storage — retire it instead: it stops being offered, and the history of what hung there is left exactly as it was.

What happened to what you had already typed

It was converted, not discarded. Every location you had typed became a place, and the works carrying it now point at it.

Different casings folded together. “East wall” and “east wall” became one place. That is not a guess.
Different spellings stayed separate. “east wall” and “E wall” became two places. Merging them is a guess about your building that only you can make, and two rows you can merge by hand is recoverable where a silent merge is not.

So you may have a few near-duplicates to tidy. Rename one to match the other and the works follow.

Text that arrives later, from a script or an old screen that names a place but does not choose one, is treated the same way: if it matches one of your places (in any casing) the piece is put on that place; if it matches none, the text is kept exactly as typed. A place is never invented for it, and nothing typed is dropped.

What did not change

The old text field still exists behind the scenes and still says where the piece is — it follows the place’s name, including when you rename a place. That matters because your sale alert emails and your Square records read it. Rename “East wall” to “East wall (by window)” and a sale alert sent tomorrow says the new name, not the old one.

Rotations: the calendar of what hangs

Your gallery does not hang work indefinitely. It runs two overlapping cycles, and Artwork Catalog → Rotation (gallery admins only) is where they live:

Featured Artist rotations, generally monthly. One or more artists are featured, and the pieces chosen for them are up for that window.
General rotations, roughly every two months. The gallery rotates the pieces on its walls.

Several run at once: a January Featured, a February Featured and a Jan/Feb General can all exist together, each with a start date and an end date. The page lists both kinds, marks the Current one of each kind, and shows how many artists and pieces are in each.

Creating and editing a rotation

Artwork Catalog → Rotation → + New rotation.
Choose the Kind, type a Name and the Starts and Ends dates, and press Create rotation. Use Edit to change a name or dates, and Delete to remove one that has nothing hanging in it.

The dates are whatever you type; nothing is worked out from a cadence. The end date cannot be before the start date, and two rotations of the same kind cannot overlap (the day one ends is not free for the next to start). A Featured rotation inside a General one is the normal case and is allowed. Artists can never set, move or extend a rotation.

What the end date means, in words

Under the dates the screen says what the end date means, and it changes as you type:

“Ends the same day as Jan/Feb General, so featured artists may carry unsold work into that General Rotation.” The two end on the same calendar date.
“Ends on January 31, in the middle of Jan/Feb General, so featured work comes off the wall.” Anything else.

“Aligned” means the end dates are equal. A day early or a day late is not aligned, and there is no grace period. That is why the sentence is there: a mistyped date shows up as a sentence that reads wrong, instead of an artist’s paintings coming down. Read it every time you enter or change a date.

Featured artists and their pieces

Open a Featured rotation to Feature an artist (pick as many as you like; a month with two featured artists needs one rotation, not two), then Choose pieces for each. Pieces are chosen, not assumed: an artist featured in February does not have every piece they own up. The list says why a piece cannot be chosen: it is sold, archived, recorded as off the gallery floor, belongs to a member whose membership has ended, or is already in another rotation that runs at the same time (a piece is in one rotation at a time). You can only choose an artist’s own pieces for a rotation where that artist is featured. The catalog shows Rotation: name on each piece that is in one.

Keeping sold pieces on the wall until the show closes. Some featured artists (and shows like a miniature show) ask that a piece sold during the show stays hung until the show ends. In the sidebar choose Artwork Catalog, then the Rotation tab, open the Featured rotation, and under that artist tick Sold pieces stay hung until the show closes (it is off until you tick it). From then on, a piece by that artist sold through your online store while the rotation runs records the rotation’s end date as the day it may leave the wall. The Online Sales Alert, the order notice email, the Online Order slip, the buyer’s confirmation and their thanks page all say: Artist has requested that the show remains hung until after the close of the show. You may pick up your piece after Oct 31, 2026, or it will be shipped after Oct 31, 2026. (with your rotation’s end date). Pieces by other artists, and sales outside the rotation’s dates, say Ready now. Untick it, or change the rotation’s end date, and every order not yet picked up or shipped follows; an order already picked up or shipped keeps its date. Only an Owner or Admin can change it.

You cannot remove an artist who still has pieces in the rotation, or delete a rotation with pieces in it: take the pieces out first. Choosing pieces for a General rotation, and what happens when a rotation ends, come in later releases.

Putting your places on a plan

A plan is a picture of a set of places, and until this existed there was no set of places to draw. You can now draw your floor plan and name each wall face with one of the places here.

Reading the room from the plan, and printing it for the desk, are still to come.

Artwork label IDs (SKUs)
Bulk upload — note that the location column is not part of the CSV import.