TIPS for Black Artists from a Collector

I offer these tips as a result of my continual involvement in the art world. My hopes are that they may help the artist as he/she navigates the unfamiliar and opaque terrain of  that business world. As an artist, those tips that you find useful, please use and make appropriate adjustments that fit your style. Those that do not apply, simply ignore. I decided to post these tips based on an experience that I had a couple of months ago when attending an art opening reception, and one of the 2 artists was 1 hour late for a 2 hour reception. Realizing the business that this artist was possibly losing by not being there to engage with collectors or future collectors, prompted me to create this list.


I asked a couple of artists to use samples of their artwork to enhance the text presented in this post. If you like any of the art work, I can give you contact information for the artist. As an artist, collector, or simply someone interested in the work of black artists,  if you have other tips, please share.

• For opening and closing receptions in your honor, please be on time, or even get to the venue before it starts. The purpose of these functions is for attendees to get to know the artist and his/her body of work that is on exhibit, and for the artist to mingle with those attending. Remember, some of those attending,  may be collectors or future collectors. As an artist, not being visible and available to answer questions could cut into crucial connections and sales. Receptions are a great venue and offer the ideal opportunity to network. 

  

  Don Griffin
  

  Mixed Media on Watercolor Paper 300 gsm,

  
  

   Acrylic, Gel Ink, Gold Ink

  
  

  Size: 22.75" x 15"

  
  

  Date: 2015

• Create an overview statement for each series that you complete. That overview of your works will answer some of the questions that collectors or prospective collectors may have about pieces in a particular series. It gives the viewer something to look at and refer to when either looking at or thinking about a piece of art to purchase.   
  
  

  

  Don Griffin
  

  Mixed Media on Watercolor Paper 300 gsm,

  
  

   Acrylic, Gel Ink, Gold Ink

  
  

  Size: 22.75" x 15"

  
  

  Date: 2015

• Accommodate a collector, if he/she requests you to take a photograph with him/her with a piece or pieces purchased. The collector is documenting the artwork and the experience with you, the artist.
• When artworks leave your studio for gallery or museum exhibitions, or are simply on loan to an individual or institution, keep a record of those pieces of art by name and description. At all times, you want to know where your art is located whenever it is out of your possession.

  

  Don Griffin
  

  Mixed Media on Watercolor Paper 300 gsm,

  
  

   Acrylic, Gel Ink, Gold Ink

  
  

  Size: 22.75" x 15"

  
  

  Date: 2015

• Always have your résumé, artist statement, and biographical sketch updated and ready, and be able to explain your work in a broad overview. As a client/collector shows interest in a particular piece or pieces, feel comfortable explaining the specifics of any series created.    
• Artists should know those collectors who buy their works, so keep rigorous records of any transactions.  

  

  Billy Colbert, 2016

• Never leave your work on consignment with a gallery or any alternative space that sells art without getting something in writing. This becomes a business transaction and needs to go beyond a handshake. 
• Don't isolate yourself. Welcome critiques from other artists, and offer critiques of their work as well. Even as you listen to what collectors say about or interpret your artwork, keep those thoughts in mind. How do those thoughts compare with your vision for what you are creating and trying to achieve. Use what enhances your vision and discard the other, but engaging brings about awareness. 

  

  Billy Colbert, 2016

• Be true to your vision and your work; you have a unique voice and perspective that makes your art special. Do not jump on the bandwagon of what is trendy and popular, simply to sell your art.
• Apply for art opportunities that fit your experience, including artist calls, art colonies/residencies, art fairs, and etc.

  

  Don Griffin
  

  Mixed Media on Watercolor Paper 300 gsm,

  
  

   Acrylic, Gel Ink, Gold Ink

  
  

  Size: 22.75" x 15"

  
  

  Date: 2015

• Keep your artist website current with accomplishments, exhibitions, images, contact information, etc. If you do not have the time to keep your website current, then seek the help of a specialist in that area. If funds are not readily available, negotiate and barter for services.
• When you are selling directly to collectors or clients provide a receipt with details of the work, including title, size, medium, date created, etc. Include a photograph of the artwork for the collector/client and make one for yourself. With the photograph that you keep, include collector/client information, this record will help you in the future if you are having a  retrospective exhibition and the curator may want to request a piece of your work from a collector to include in an exhibition. Recently, I had a curator to contact me because the artist told her that I owned a particular piece of art. In actuality, I did not own the art in question.  

 Please share tips that you would like to share with artists.   

• Sheila Crider @SheilaCriderArt shared (January 2, 2017): "I think it's important to send thank you notes...."

Artists Talk: "Uprooted: Artists Respond to San Francisco's Black Exodus"

3.9 Art Collective        San Francisco        Uprooted          

Pushed Out        Working Together       Nancy Cato 

                   

Rhiannon MacFadyen        Rodney Ewing       Mark Harris

Fillmore District        Displaced        Colonization Ahead

Black Exodus        Diminishing Number of Black People        

Don't Gentrify Me!       Foreclosure        Doors Being Closed

Doors a Metaphor for Home          

Buses are Representation of Big Technology

History of Trying to Find Home         

Less African American Art Makers Exhibited

    

Select African American Art Exhibitions: Highlights for 2013

This highlight features a few exhibitions that are either currently on view or will be opening in the near future. Presenting the exhibitions as they approach their opening dates or shortly after opening, assures a freshness and currency of information for visual art enthusiasts. A number of important traveling exhibitions that opened earlier in the year are still being featured across the country and are accessible from the Blog page entitled: Select Art Exhibitions in 2013. This page is updated on a weekly basis by either adding newly discovered exhibitions or removing those that are approaching their expiration date. Its intent is to provide comprehensive coverage of current ongoing exhibitions on view for the current quarter of the year.

Black Art Project (BAP) welcomes any information or leads that you might have relating to Black art exhibitions, particularly regional exhibitions that are not traditionally marketed on a national scale. BAP will verify the accuracy of any information submitted. Thank you for any assistance that you provide.

Boston, Massachusetts

Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Loïs Mailou Jones, La Baker (detail), 1977, Acrylic and collage on canvas. Gift of the Lois Mailou Jones Pierre-Noel Trust.

Loïs Mailou Jones presents 30 paintings and drawings by the distinguished, internationally acclaimed graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. "This exhibition presents works from every stage of Jones’s artistic career, beginning with her early copies after objects in the Museum’s collections, her teaching career at Howard University, and the travels that shaped her distinctive vision and contributions to American art." 

The exhibition, Loïs Mailou Jones, will be on view through October 14, 2013 in the Bernard and Barbara Stern Shapiro Gallery (Gallery 231) at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Read more at Boston's NPR news station.

Chattanooga, Tennessee

Hunter Museum of American Art 

 

Whitfield Lovell,

Kin LII (Pie in the Sky), 2008, Conte on paper, plaster sculpture with base,

Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York

Whitfield Lovell: Deep River was organized by the Hunter Museum of American Art. The highlight of Deep River is a large, site-specific installation that Lovell specifically created for the Hunter that explores the history of Camp Contraband, which was located just across the river from the Hunter Museum. Contraband camps became the foundation for postwar African American neighborhoods, facilitating the process that produced rapid urbanization of former slaves, most of whom had lived in rural areas. 

Whitfield Lovell, Pago Pago,

2008, conte crayon on wood with radios 

and sound, 97 x 66 x 13 inches, 

Courtesy of the artist and 

DC Moore Gallery, New York

"The Hunter Museum exhibition features artwork created since 2008, including the artist's signature tableaux that are constructed of intricate charcoal drawings on vintage wood juxtaposed with found objects. Lovell prefers to leave the history of his salvaged wood intact, never removing the layers of age paint, adding only his Conté crayon drawings and the objects he has collected over the years."

Also included in the exhibition are a number of mixed media drawings from Lovell's ongoing Kin series. Each of the Kin works features a portrait along with a single object; see image of Pie in the Sky (Kin LII) above, center.

Deep River will be on view through October 13, 2013.

Greensboro, North Carolina

University of North Carolina Greensboro

Weatherspoon Art Museum

Willie Cole, Shoe Bouquet, 2009, Shoes, wood, and wire, 65" x 56" x 61".
  Courtesy of Alexander & Bonin Gallery. Photo: Jason Mandella.

Complex Conversations: Willie Cole Sculptures and Wall Works will be on view in the Bob and Lissa Shelley McDowell Gallery, The Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, September 14 - December 15, 2013. This exhibition covers more than thirty years of the artist's work, including three-dimensional sculpture to drawing and printmaking.

The exhibition establishes thematic consistencies and intense interactions of Cole’s art and its focus on key consumer objects like hairdryers, high heel shoes, and, above all, the steam iron, transforming these everyday mass-produced objects into precious icons or symbolic representations that explore ideas of diversity, identity, and commercialization.

In the words of Patterson Sims (Western Michigan University), Curator of Complex Conversations, "Willie Cole grew up in post-industrial Newark, N.J., and sees himself as an urban archaeologist." Inner-city African-American life and family have been the underpinnings of Cole’s work. He has lived most of his life in or near Newark, NJ, a city fraught with racial tensions and violence in the late 1960s.

Read more about Willie Cole.

An Artist Talk will be held on Friday, September 27, 2013 at 5:30 pm. Seating for this event is limited; up to two seats may be reserved beginning August 19. Details: Event Calendar. Reception follows. Free.

Houston, Texas
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Momme, 2008. Gelatin silver print. 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy the
artist and Galerie Michel Rein, Paris.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: WITNESS will be on view in the Zilkha Gallery at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston through October 13, 2013. The exhibition features photographs, videos, digital works, and a recent photolithograph series that speak to the economic issues surrounding her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania as it struggled to weather the country's shift from a manufacturing economy (steel plants) to an information economy. Frazier documents   "Braddock's deterioration with an unflinching eye and a gift for communicating through documentary images that connects her to other socially engaged practitioners like American photographers Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks." 

As Frazier sees it, her work is "the story of economic globalization and the decline of manufacturing as told through the bodies of three generations of African American women." The primary players in this story are Frazier's Grandma Ruby (1925-2009), her Mom (1959-) and the artist herself (1982-). This exhibition includes a selection of more than 20 black-and-white photographs from the artist's renowned Notion of Family series.To learn more about the back story of what drives and motivates Frazier to action as an artist and activist read Contemporary Arts Museum. 

The exhibition, LaToya Ruby Frazier: WITNESS, is accompanied by a bound, illustrated catalogue.

Knoxville, Tennessee

Knoxville Museum of Art

    Thornton Dial, Lady Holds the Long Neck Bird, 1991, Watercolor, 29 5/8 x 22".                                                  Ackland Art Museum, Gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, 2011.                                                               

Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper is on view at the Knoxville Museum of Art through August 25, 2013. Although Thornton Dial is widely recognized for his large-scale, multimedia assemblages, his most abundant body of work is his drawings, which he began producing in the early 1990s. This exhibition of Dial's drawings from 1990-1991, represent a pivotal moment in his artistic career
and reflects his characteristic and broadly coherent iconography of women, fish, birds, roosters, and tigers, rendered in a variety of media. Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper "offers a fresh look at the artist’s achievements as seen through the medium of drawing and provide a touchstone of Dial’s creative process."
 
A publication which offers the first sustained critical attention to Dial’s works on paper accompanies this exhibition.

Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper was organized and circulated by the Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

For additional exhibitions featured across the country see: Select Art Exhibitions in 2013.

Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library Art and Artist Files

The Smithsonian American Art Museum / National Portrait Gallery Library Art and Artist Files are scholarly resources that are carefully maintained for future researchers and contain original pieces of ephemera such as small exhibition catalogues and brochures, announcements of or invitations to gallery shows, and press releases.

Although international artist material has been added to the files in the past, currently the library will only accept material for American artists. For an artist to warrant inclusion in the Art and Artist Files collection, the artist should have been included in at least three group and/or individual art exhibitions in an accredited art museum, commercial art gallery, or college/university gallery or museum (that is not a student show). Other criteria may also be considered at the discretion of the librarian or files manager.

  
The following are acceptable material for the files:                              

• Artist statement or interview
• Artist biography, bibliography, and/or CV
• Invitation, announcement, and/or press release for a solo exhibition
• An exhibition catalogue, of less than 30 pages, from a museum or dealer on one artist (not a catalogue on multiple artists)
• Some newspaper or magazine articles which are not readily available online or at this library

 The following are not accepted for the files:

• Artist portfolio or self-published promotional material
• Unpublished or self-published materials
• Slides
• Photographs lacking clear copyright
• Photocopies
• Ephemera lacking bibliographic identity (name, place of publication, exhibition dates)
• Any materials which can be accessed via the internet

The library reserves the right to refuse any donations which are offered. Any items not accepted for inclusion into the vertical files can be mailed back to the sender, if requested.

The library welcomes freely given additions to the vertical files.

Contact:

• Main phone line (202-633-8236) or email silaapg@si.edu and the staff would be able to tell you what’s in your file. 
• Additional information can be sent to the attention of Alice Clarke at:
  Smithsonian American Art Museum/
  National Portrait Gallery Library
  PO Box 37012
  VB 2100, MRC 975
  Washington, DC  20013-7012
   

SEE earlier post highlighting African American artists in the Artist Files. 

 

Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery's Artist Files: Highlighting African American Artists

This post features the results from an on-going and extensive project that I was  involved with, on an infrequent basis for the past 3 years, at the Smithsonian American Art/National Portrait Gallery Library (AA/PG). The project focused on identifying African American artists who are included in AA/PG Library's Artist Files which are a part of its vertical files collection. The vertical files are a rich special collection resource consisting of over "500 file cabinet drawers of ephemeral materials on art, artists, art institutions, collectors, and special subjects."

What are the Artist Files?

In AA/PG's vertical files, approximately 254 file cabinet drawers are devoted to artists. Artists names from the vertical files have been identified and compiled into an online catalog, Artist Files, which includes at least 48,817 artists with new artists added frequently. The Artist Files contain ephemera such as small exhibition brochures; announcements of or invitations to gallery and museum exhibitions; press releases; clippings from newspapers, magazines, or auction catalogs; correspondence; and reproductions of works. These files are a valuable resource for art historical research done on emerging regional and local artists, and often are the only obtainable sources of information on those artists. Although, online art ephemera is increasing, paper art ephemera, such as that in these files, is still heavily used for its dynamic historical and current content. The richness of these files will become even greater as art librarians, artists, galleries, collectors, and art institutions collaborate and cooperate in getting even more ephemera material to the AA/PG Library.

African American Artists Included in Artist Files

I have spent time inspecting the contents of the folders in the vertical files to identify African American artists in this rich online resource.  As a personal project and being narrow in my focus, I emphasized those who were African American or those of the Black Diaspora with a strong U.S.A. connection via residence, schooling, or employment. 

If you see your name on this list of African American artists, you are encouraged to update the material that is included in your folder(s). However, if your name does not appear on this list, check the master Artist Files list, to see if your name appears there and was not capture for the specialized African American file. If your name appears on the master Artist Files, bring to my attention, so corrections and updates may be made to the African American artist files.  

This post simply introduces the Artist Files and brings the reader up to date on this African American artists' project. For artists who are not yet included in the Artist Files, a future post will highlight criteria for inclusion. For the time being, direct any questions to blackartproject@gmail.com.