How Shows Travel
or
the value of a body of work!
How do my shows travel?
By UPS!!! Duh!
Actually, I wanted to talk to you exhibiting artists about how to maximize the benefit of your output.
Big museums and galleries co-operate, plan together, create all kinds of insurance and legal documents to develop original shows that travel to multiple venues. Smaller museums in small communities sometimes rent exhibitions from specialist exhibition agencies. University museums use a variety of means to develop their programming: calls for proposals, curriculum led thematic shows, research led shows, student developed shows and some of the same tactics of the “big boys” as well as the tiny community led museums.
I am not a museum, of any size. I run a tiny gallery in a medium sized metropolitan area and I am,
first and foremost, AN ARTIST.
If you look through my resume, you’ll see repeating exhibition titles:
- Off the Shelf (2 times)
- A Way with Words (4 times)
- Assembling Memory (3 times)
- Ophelia Project ( 2 times)
- In Stitches ( 2 times)
- Eros & Thanatos (3 times)
- And now….Bending Toward Beauty ( 3 times this year!)
I’m not a genius! Can’t type or spell accurately for love or money! And calendars….Don’t get me started! My friends think I have a calendar disorder! I may not ever know what the date is and do confuse what day of the week it is…but I never miss an appointment! Oh, and distraction?
But I digress.
I have always worked with ideas over multiple years in multiple artworks, even in college. When I became fascinated with how the grain in plywood formed its own drawing, I carved drawings in plywood for a full semester. When I was studying printmaking, I became interested in how I could take the images as well as the plates into three dimensional space, creating a small show from 6 deeply etched plates assembled into a cube displayed with their embossed prints.
That is simply how my material curiosity works.
Something strikes my fancy and I try to find all the ways to express it in all the materials I can imagine or find on my walks or in the basement under the stairs! It’s sort of the great “what if…” question on steriods: What if I did this? What if I did that? Or that? Or that on top of that? I might have several idea streams working their way through the studio at any one time.
Before you know it, I have a body of work!
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And that is cool and all. Right? So what?
Well, if you have a body of work, say, 10 related pieces (with hope for more to come) you can begin to send proposals for solo shows. As long as there is something that makes the pieces look right together: visually, materially, thematically…
When I was making the transition from art festivals to galleries, I realized I needed some titles for the shows I was beginning to propose!
Duh!
The first accepted proposal was titled Off the Shelf.
I wrote another proposal…needed a title, and used Off the Shelf again. So that show traveled to 2 venues! My first traveling show.
Actually I did not think of it as a traveling show until years later. It was a convenience to re-use the title! But as my resume got longer, titles began to repeat more. A Way with Words went to four venues. Now that was traveling! I think that’s when I started to think of these various, changing bodies of work, as shows that could travel.
Where have these shows traveled? All kinds of places! Neighborhood offices and churches, civic centers, online galleries, non-profit spaces, college and university galleries, small commercial galleries, even a monastery. Because I have bodies of work, I can do this.
Now, when I am chasing ideas around the studio, I know I am developing shows that can travel.
Usually by UPS
(Eros and Thanatos exhibition performance still)
2022 Bending Toward Beauty, Envision Arts, online at https://www.envisionartshow.com/bending-toward-beauty
Bending Toward Beauty, Hopkins Art Center, Hopkins MN
Bending Toward Beauty, Duluth Institute for Art, Duluth, MN
2020 Eros and Thanatos, Seminole State College, Sanford, FL
2018 Eros and Thanatos; ArtSpace, Richmond, VA
2017 Eros and Thanatos, Wiseman Gallery, Rogue Community College, Grants Pass, OR
2005 Assembling Memory, Mott Community College, Flint, MI
2003 A Way with Words, Las Vegas Civic Center Gallery, Las Vegas, NV
A Way with Words, Appalachian Craft Center, TN
2001 Assembling Memory, Gallery 402, OIA, New York City, NY
Assembling Memory, Ella Sharp Museum, Jackson, MI
Assembling Memory, St. Clair Comm. College, Port Huron, MI
2000 A Way with Words, Sinclair Community College, Dayton, OH
A Way with Words, Gallery 1708, Richmond, VA
1998 A Way with Words, Chadron State College, Chadron, NE
Off the Shelf, Alma College, Alma, MI
1996 Off the Shelf, David Thomas Gallery, Lansing, MI
