Ann Arbor native Helen Gotlib earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the U-M in 2003, with concentrations in printmaking and scientific illustration. That led her to develop what she calls “a process-oriented drawing style characterized by extreme detail.” Lately, she’s been making mixed media pieces focused on the life cycle of flowers.
But while the university prepared her to create artwork, she says, missing from her education was anything about how to promote and sell it. She’s had to learn that on her own.
“I make my living full-time as an artist,” says Gotlib, who’ll do a dozen fairs this year, including the Ann Arbor Street Art Fair, the Original. “But I don’t know many of my classmates who do that.”
The Original fair was launched in 1960 with the dual mission of broadening the audience for art and luring people to the campus area during the slack summer season. From the beginning, some artists looked down on those concessions to commerce. The late South U storekeeper Bruce Henry, who came up with the idea, delighted in recounting former UMMA director Jean Paul Slusser’s declaration that “no good artist would sit on the street to sell art.”
Like tens of thousands of artists then and since, Gotlib does sell on the street. She says she appreciates how art fairs draw in customers who might be uncomfortable in galleries and bring people into direct contact with the work and with the artist. And, she adds, “I do well at shows. There will be one or two where I make almost nothing, but eventually it pays off.” She recalls being in an art fair in St. Joseph, in an absolutely beautiful location on Lake Michigan, where she didn’t make a single sale. But people who had seen her work there later bought a small piece from her in Ann Arbor, and four years later gave her a $6,000 commission.
For Gotlib, just being at the Ann Arbor Art Fair is a form of promotion–though, with the Original fair’s $700 booth fee, she notes, “it’s expensive advertising.” So she works at keeping in touch with her customers between shows, combining conventional “snail mail” communication with the Internet and social media.
Gotlib likes mailing postcards because, unlike email, “they are not easily deletable.” The image might sit on a desk or refrigerator for months, reminding former and potential customers of upcoming shows. Everyone who has ordered a work from Gotlib gets at least one postcard and email a year, timed for when she has a show coming to the recipient’s area.
Wisconsin woodblock printer Nick Wroblewski, the featured artist at this year’s Original fair, also prefers to mail postcards. “I tend to believe that emailed announcements are a little saturated,” he explains–by email–“with folks still appreciating an actual physical card.” Though he posts on Facebook, he says, “Social media can be a little illusive. I still feel like there is no substitute for actual content. The work has to be good, no matter how many ‘likes’ a person can garner.”
Gotlib embraces Facebook. She maintains two accounts, one personal and one professional, the latter with over 2,000 “fans.” She posts regularly when she is in her studio–images of her work or responses to those who have posted comments or questions. She pays the site to put her work where it is more easily seen and says with surprise and delight, “I’ll meet people at parties who say, ‘I’ve been following you on Facebook.'”
“When I’m not actively producing new work,” Gotlib explains, “I will focus more on marketing and sales. And then I’ll go back to creating new stuff.”
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Many artists don’t think of themselves as involved in marketing at all, at least in a conventional sense of the term. “A lot of marketing, for me, comes down to convincing people how great your work is,” says Petoskey ceramic and fiber artist Kim Krumrey. “That, to me, feels like bragging, which I was raised to believe is not something you should do. So, the whole concept makes me uncomfortable. I like my work to speak for itself.”
Krumrey, who sells at the State Street Area Art Fair, seems largely content to present her best work and then trust that those who stop by her booth will be struck by what they see and make a purchase. Her efforts to reach clients in other ways are minimal. “I do have a website,” she says, “which is just ‘promoted’ by being on my business cards, which I hand out at shows. I don’t promote my work on Facebook or collect a mailing list.”
She explains: “I became an artist because I love creating things and because it’s important to me to spend my days enjoying what I do and being in charge of how I decide to spend my time. That means keeping the things I don’t enjoy to a minimum … Being self-employed means that I have the freedom to take a beautiful spring afternoon and go for a bike ride instead of being in the studio … If I decide not to spend ‘x’ amount of time on marketing because I don’t like it, I know that my business might not grow as quickly or be as successful, so I have to weigh the consequences of being less ‘successful’ or being happier with how I spend my time. And for me, being happier is what success is. Other people might view being more financially stable as being more successful. I guess that’s different for everyone. I have found the balance that works for me.”
Like Gotlib, however, Krumrey understands that art fairs build visibility as well as sales. “The art fairs have worked as marketing for me,” she says, “although not by anything I have done other than just show up and have work that gallery owners like. I get approached by many galleries at shows who want to represent me. This works well for me because it saves me from having to seek out galleries, which I would not enjoy. If a gallery approaches me, I know they’re already interested. I can then pick and choose the galleries that I think will best represent me and whose overall style I think will attract the right clientele for my work.”
Photographer Abram Kaplan is also disinclined to market his work directly, though for different reasons. Unlike many art fair artists, he does not count on the sale of his art for income, and so he does no marketing “beyond a minimal level.” As a full-time professor of environmental studies at Ohio’s Denison University, he is “not in search of income from [his artwork] beyond covering my expenses, and I find that the combination of word of mouth, people I know, and repeat customers is–or has been–sufficient.” He does routinely place an ad in the official Art Fair Guide.
In an email Kaplan says he has “a push-pull relationship with the art fair experience. As an academic, if I’m to be judged on the ‘quality’ of my work, my art colleagues look quite disdainfully down their noses at fairs. From that vantage point, the work exhibited at fairs is largely bereft of the layers of meaning that ‘real’ art has invested in it, and therefore anyone who would be part of selling in that way must be less complete in his/her artistry. I actually have come to understand that perspective better as I have evolved in my own work, and there are elements of truth in the snootiness–just as there are deep elements of classism, prejudice, insensitivity, and even ignorance of the work and lives of exhibitors. And/but it heightens my uneasiness about marketing, and wanting my patrons–that being the people who come in to my booth and potentially leave with something I have created–to be interested for the ‘right reasons.'”
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Sandra Xenakis, who works as a business coach for artists, sees many who share Kaplan’s antipathy to marketing. “Artists don’t tend to see themselves as involved in business,” she says. “They are right-brained, and the business world tends to be more left-brained.”
Xenakis is a jeweler, but she also has more than thirty years of marketing and public relations experience with agencies in the Detroit area. Under the name Art Meets Business, she has been coaching artists since 2007. Offered in the past with grant support through the Chelsea Center for the Arts, the Chelsea District Library, and Washtenaw County’s Arts Alliance, the program is now run independently by Xenakis.
First-timer art fair vendors, she says, need a special kind of coaching: how to set up a booth, how to interact with clients who stop by, and how to follow up. “Pricing is a very big deal,” Xenakis says. “It takes some work to research what is selling and for how much.”
Many artists would rather spend their time creating their art than conducting that kind of research. But others see the value of marketing, both at the art fair itself and beyond.
“Artists,” Xenakis says, “are notoriously tech illiterate,” so she may help them create a plan to offer an e-newsletter, a Facebook page, a blog, or a website. And she will make sure that all communication, whether email or business cards, has a link to those sites.
Xenakis emphasizes that artists need to build and sustain relationships with former and future clients. For example, she might suggest that artists send mailings, digital or snail, thanking clients who have purchased their work. “Most artists,” she explains, “have their set customers, and they need to establish ongoing contact with their regulars.”
To do that, they need to be diligent about collecting contact information from potential clients who visit their booths. Leaving a sign-up sheet on table next to the artist’s cards is a minimal first step.
Ann Arbor jeweler Idelle Hammond-Sass is a former client of Xenakis. Hammond-Sass, who sells at Ann Arbor’s South University Art Fair, says she used to have a sign-up sheet but now prefers to ask for contact information directly from people who buy her work.
Hammond-Sass, who works out of a large basement studio in her Ann Arbor Hills home, sends out a couple of hundred postcards to clients prior to the Ann Arbor Art Fair or other events (she does three to five art fairs a year, primarily in Michigan) where her work will be available. She is in the process of switching to email for this contact, and she is making the change to Facebook, though she says, “I am not yet comfortable with it–I’m not always sure whether I’m posting as a person or as a business.”
Like Gotlib, she is pleased and somewhat surprised that through Facebook she has been found by “people I don’t even know,” and commissions have resulted from these contacts. But most of her commissions still come the old-fashioned way, from someone who’s seen her work, picked up her card, and gotten back in touch with her.
Hammond-Sass stays in regular communication with her customers and develops relationships with them. She also cultivates relationships through her teaching–for the last five years she has taught classes in her studio through Ann Arbor Parks and Recreation in addition to her work through the Ann Arbor Art Center. “Frequently,” she says, “I sell work to former students.”
She also does a holiday show, “Art on Adare” (where she lives), with fiber artist Carol Furtado and glassblower Annette Baron. They share each other’s contact lists and online postings–a blend of non-digital and digital networking that she finds an effective way to reach a wider audience.
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Many artists feel they need to market themselves to avoid being lost in the crowd. With more than 1,000 artists showing their work, the competition for attention and dollars is intense.
“The Ann Arbor Art Fair is too big,” says painter Dylan Strzynski, “so each individual artist gets too small a piece of the pie.”
Strzynski, a mixed-media painter who emphasizes architecture and landscape, exhibits at the Original fair. He’s also Helen Gotlib’s companion, but his marketing efforts are less systematic than hers. He doesn’t leave out a sign-up list, instead asking “serious people”–those with whom he has had “good conversation”–to give their contact information. But, he adds, “I don’t email people who have signed up very often, maybe once or twice a year. I do most of my marketing on Facebook, where I try to accumulate a lot of ‘friends’ and announce upcoming events.” He says he spends a minimum of two hours per week on his Facebook page, and sometimes much more than that when he is updating recent work. But, Strzynski notes thoughtfully, “Facebook doesn’t feel like marketing any more. It’s what people do.”
Strzynski recently started using Instagram, posting snapshots of “pictures I like.” And he just opened a Twitter account, though more to promote the documentary he is making about art fair artists than to market his own painting. He confesses that sometimes he has to work to find “something interesting enough” to tweet.
The Internet also offers artists an outlet to sell work directly. Strzynski and Gotlib recently collaborated to create limited-edition reproductions of her botanicals. While Gotlib’s originals sell at art fairs for prices ranging from hundreds of dollars up to $10,000, she sells the reproductions for $35 on Etsy, an e-commerce website that offers handmade (art, crafts, bath and beauty products, toys) and “vintage” items as well as craft supplies. Though Etsy suffers from the same declasse reputation that some associate with art fairs, its more than 30 million registered users, and nearly one million sellers, have a strong appeal.
“Etsy is a good place to sell work,” Gotlib says, “though there are not many fine artists selling there. Some people make a lot of money there selling beads and other art supplies.” It’s also providing a backup to her own website. She does not yet have a good setup for direct purchases there, so when people find things they like there, she directs them to Etsy to buy.
Chris Belleau, a glassblower based in Providence, Rhode Island, also turned to Etsy to supplement his sales at art fairs, including in the State Street Area Art Fair. Last year, Belleau found himself very busy, with normal production work and the difficult task of moving into a new studio after twenty-six years and then installing a new 500-pound ceramic pot around which he builds his furnace. So he hired Jessica Puleo-Hernandez to help him market his work on the craft website.
Puleo-Hernandez improved the quality of the photos of Belleau’s glass, rewrote the descriptions, and added tags to help browsers find his work. “The key,” she emails, “is getting people to look at YOUR things. I suppose in some ways it’s better that I write Chris’ descriptions for him. I see them from the point of view of a consumer, and I try to get inside people’s heads to see how they might search for an item, and add tags so they will get Chris’ items when they do a search.” She emphasizes the importance of high-quality photographs: “IMHO, GOOD PICS are of paramount importance. When you cannot pick up and examine an item closely, you want to see as much as you can, as clearly as you can.”
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At the Ann Arbor Art Fair, of course, you can pick up an item and examine it closely. You can try out how the earrings hang, see the brushwork on a painting, feel the bronze statue or clay pot, and experience a photograph at full size, not shrunk down to fit the screen of a laptop. Visitors also pick up business cards and postcards from artists whose work they like, and they share their own contact information with them. Digital sites take the heat and sore feet out of the art-shopping experience–but also the chance to experience the work firsthand, and to talk face-to-face with the artist.
For artists, the continuing appeal of the Ann Arbor Art Fair as a marketing platform is simple: thousands of people visit their site on the street, drawn by their interest in art, but also by their desire for free entertainment, sidewalk sales, Ann Arbor’s restaurant scene, or simply to be part of the buzz in the streets at the fair. They are here, and it takes more than a mouse click for them to leave.
