WHAT’S YOUR STORY?

Christie’s Marketing

And why should you care?

I just attended my second Christie’s Auction House education program. This one is on marketing. I have enjoyed the education I receive from Christie’s. It’s mighty spendy, but the courses have great depth. You get to listen to global experts and representatives from the business of art. The first session of Marketing, Communications and PR for the Art World was all about brand development.

What’s a BRAND?

Many artists find this language offensive. After all, we make high art, not toilet paper! However there is value in examining the vocabulary of marketing. BRAND is a term of marketing. We lay people and “lowly artists” tend to think about brand as advertising lingo for selling things like toilet paper. And it is that.. But actually,in practice, it’s the story of the product or company! For artists, your brand is the story of your artwork.

What does perfecting your brand story do for you, as an artist?

Surprisingly, it can be very useful. Defining your brand story will, almost automatically, write your elevator speech

WHAT’S an ELEVATOR SPEECH?

You know…the short little paragraph you share when your parents, your grandma, your boss, a reporter, a potential buyer, a new friend, a grant panel, a potential gallery director…ask,

“What do you do?“

My short answer is:

“I make sculptural textile work, combining mixed-media practices with fabric and embroidery across digital and manual platforms.”

Of course, I elaborate if there is genuine interest!

But that is just part of the story

As I was listening to the class session I began to ask myself about the broader story, my influences. An interviewer recently asked me.

“What’s your story? Tell me how you got from there to here?”

My career has spread across many media over these many years! Truly, I have NOT been flitting from medium to medium. I am driven from medium to medium by the current needs of the story! Certainly there are threads that connect way back throughout a long life of many experiences/ influences…

So, maybe, just maybe…THIS is the Story I want to tell YOU!

It is a biographical journey of sorts.

I was born looking! At everything! 72 years ago! in Ithaca, NY. My earliest memories are of light flickering through dust particles and shadows on the wall. Because of the time period and the place I grew up, I was not raised by television. We did have a TV, pretty early on, but there were only a few channels. We still listened to radio dramas and variety shows: Palladin: Have Gun Will Travel and Arthur Godfrey Variety Hour. The fields, forests and streams behind my house were a constant source of discovery: birds in the air, bugs under rocks, rabbit burrows, strawberries, thorns, vines and sticks to investigate, eat and/or manipulate.

The family believed in the value of visual art and music as well as the rugged outdoors. There were many forced marches up many hillsides in search of blueberries and vistas. Many geographies were seen from car windows driving to the west coast, many campsites by cold mountain streams in August, snow on the tent is high summer. And many more sights and cultures were experienced when we spent a sabbatical year in Taiwan and out continued circumnavigation of the globe.

All these experiences stay with me, below the surface, without language, but influential nonetheless. When I look across all the media I have worked in, certain threads of relationship remain constant:

The need to look deeply
The need for embodied experience: we are sensual bodies experiencing the world with our senses
The drive to discover meaning by working with materials
The drive toward joy: the ability to choose optimism, over pessimism, again and again, on a daily basis.
The drive to learn and synthesize meaning from all of life’s experiences, using all the tools at my disposal
And the drive to share ALL OF THIS, visually