Letter to Artists: So, you want a curator/gallery to represent/promote/sell your artwork?

Dear Artist,

My father was right.  "No man is an island," he would tell me time and again when I needed to get things done. He meant, we live in a community of colleagues, family and friends where communication is crucial.

If you are invited to show your work at an exhibition there are a few things you must do.

1. Professional behavior includes courtesy and preparedness. Communicate with the curator or gallery owner about your work.
2. Provide information immediately. The kind of information you will be asked to give is typically:
• Your resume or CV (curriculum vitae), your bio and a statement of your most recent work
• Your contact information: telephone, mailing address, email
• Your tax ID number
• Titles and year of your work, including medium, dimensions, edition and price
• You should do this as soon as you have confirmation of your exhibition dates
• And seriously, if a curator requests you to prepare work for a special exhibition, think twice. There is no time like the present and if you have good quality current work, that is what needs to be shown. Preparing new work under pressure is never a good idea. Period.
3. Always have excellent quality high resolution images of your work on hand. If a catalog or print materials will be distributed for the exhibition, high resolution images need to be delivered to the curator 8 weeks before the exhibition opens. It takes a lot of time to design a postcard and catalog, and you want it beautifully done. Who wants an ugly card, right?
• A high resolution image is no less than 300 dpi and about 2400 pixels at its largest measure
• A low resolution image is usually 72-100 dpi and around 800-1000 pixels
• You can deliver both for the exhibition? Your curator will love you!
4. Be prepared to deliver your work for installation on time.
5. Know the physical limitations of your work.
• If it's heavy, be prepared with extra tools and assistance to install the work.
• If your work depends on technology, provide technological tools and be prepared to advise on best installation methods.
• If your work is especially fragile, be prepared to address safety concerns with the gallery owner, at installation and when shipping it out to clients.
• Always remember, you're the artist and you know your work best.
6. Help the curator and gallery promote your show. Talk it up. If you're on Facebook or love to Tweet, publicize your work. Do you have a blog or website? Post an announcement. We live in the 21st century, a world of broad social networks, where everything helps. 
7. Show up at the opening reception on time. There is nothing worse for a curator to open a new exhibition to an audience waiting for the artist to arrive. You're the star, and this is your work. Be nice to the curator who invited you to show your work, and respect the audience that may acquire your work.
8. Did you invite special clients? Introduce them to the curator and gallerist. This helps everyone network and create new friendships, but it makes you look professional, poised and confident of your own relationships. It also reassures the gallery you will let them manage your sales from this exhibition.
9. Never, ever, boast about your studio sales. That's the quickest way to kill any future relationships. And why would you want to hurt the people that want to promote your work? Remember, "No man is an island" and we can all do so much more if we work together.
10. There is no excuse for bad manners or poor communication. There are a lot of artists around, and this has been true for hundreds of years. We know about the 'bad boys' of art, but it's the professionals who appreciate the work involved with putting together an exhibition that shine and are remembered.

Can you skip any of these steps? No, not really. It's like there is nothing that's halfway good or bad. It's good or bad. Never in between.

If I sound like your mother, maybe she was right. So sit up and pay attention. Grace is a rare quality, especially when so many artists are struggling. Only a few are invited to show their artwork. Be gracious, be good, be a star.

Phillip Hua solo exhibition at Hang Art Gallery

'Entwined Excess' Solo Exhibition by Phillip Hua at Hang Art Gallery September 1-15, 2011

"Entwined Excess" is an exploration into the intermingled themes of nature, commerce, and industry. In Bay Area artist Phillip Hua's first solo exhibition with Hang Art, Hua displays new artistic advances by drawing upon his cultural heritage and incorporating Asian motifs into his works on paper and sculpture. Continuing to work with his chosen artistic references to commerce and industry, Hua's newest body of work looks towards the relationships between the economies of the east and the west.

Works on Paper
Hua's featured works on paper, from his re:action series, are created through a process of printing and painting on segmented portions of individual financial newspaper pages, after which Hua systematically laminates each individual page with packaging tape and assembles them to create a complete work. Likening the process of creating each piece as a part of the "engine of economy," notes Hua, "the works on paper at first look are images of nature, however they're fused in paper and plastic, similar to being packaged and manufactured for consumption, and over time, dependent on their exposure to sunlight, the works will age and yellow, reflective of environmental decay, while remaining intact in their packaging." In this new collection of works, including a large scale work at 80" x 40", Hua draws from Chinese brush painting imagery, incorporating birds, flowers, and trees.

Sculpture
Introducing sculpture into his artistic dialog, Entwined Excess includes "Bull Market", a mixed media sculpture consisting of a rusted bull skull brandishing golden tree branches in place of horns. Sprouting from the 'horn' branches, Hua has fashioned leaves made from li xi envelopes, a symbol of prosperity, traditionally used for handing out money during the Lunar New Year. 

Exhibition Dates: September 1-15, 2011; Artist Reception: Thursday, Sept 1, 6-8pm 

Hang Art Gallery. 567 Sutter St., San Francisco, CA, 94102 

Phillip Hua will also show work in the group exhibition, DECAY, at Arc Gallery from November 1-30.

Lorraine Peltz Chicago solo exhibition

In Dazzling and Bright Lorraine Peltz presents a vivacious array of work using imagery culled from personal history and the contemporary moment. Her paintings of chandeliers, flowers, and painterly events reference both past and present and provide a profound and evocative visual and sensory experience about the nature of private identity and public persona. For Peltz the chandelier conjures a remembered culture and her patterned flowers and decorative flourishes suggest the contemporary.  As Maria Porges recently wrote about the work, these “shamelessly beautiful paintings of ghostly, graceful chandeliers feature some particularly baroque-looking versions of these glittering fixtures. In her pictures, they float in an unmediated, unidentifiable space, or from so close that they all but fill the frame.  Peltz has been described as a painter of pleasure—a description that seems apt not only in terms of the visual enjoyment provided by her canvases, but in the way in which her subject matter suggests the celebration of some significant event. Gazing at these paintings, we realize that we should stop and smell the flowers, even, dance to the music that is playing, somewhere nearby, underneath a gleaming chandelier.”

Lorraine Peltz Dazzling and Bright Packer Schopf Gallery 942 W. Lake St. Chicago, IL 60608  September 9th - October 22nd 2011

Peter Foucault's Pop Up Wrap Up

What: Mobile Arts Platform Pop-Up Wrap-Up Exhibition
Where: 934 Brannan St. (between 8th & 9th)
When: Sunday, August 14, 1-5PM
How much: Free admission


This free public event event marks the last in series of five collaborative exhibitions for 2010 – 2011. Pop-Up Wrap-Up celebrates the many creative forces who contributed to and interacted with mobile participatory art structures conceived by lead artists Peter Foucault and Chris Treggiari.


Pop-Up Wrap-Up features participatory art making activities as well as original artwork produced by collaborating local artists and by the public at four prior interactive pop-up exhibitions at SOMArts and the Potrero Hill Neighborhood, Northern California Cherry Blossom and Urban Youth Arts festivals.


The retrospective component of Pop-Up Wrap-Up includes a mural by Miranda Bergman and ergonomically innovative seating and structural installations by Furniture Design and Architecture MFA students from California College of the Arts. Pop-Up Wrap-Up will also display video and digital media content commissioned for and displayed at the neighborhood exhibitions, as well as live poetry and performance from the Potrero Hill Neighborhood Festival, video combining historic and contemporary photographs of Potrero Hill by artist and Interim Director of Cultural Affairs JD Beltran, a short documentary about Bay Area murals by John Urquhart, Chris Treggiari and Peter Foucault, and video by Peter Foucault and Nico Crisafulli featuring street art from India & Berlin.


Pop-Up Wrap-Up revisits three participatory projects included in MAP’s installations at the Urban Youth Arts and Cherry Blossom festivals. Artist James Gregg will produce a new set of stencils for an interactive stencil art assembly station. Pop-Up Wrap-Up also resurrects the Yes, We Can ________ Positive Picketing Project, which allows any member of the public to create a mini-pronouncement of values by customizing a ready-made protest style sign with their own message. There will be a live reading of haiku submitted by the public at the Cherry Blossom festival, as well as an opportunity to submit new haiku.


About the Mobile Arts Platform (MAP)
The Mobile Arts Platform (MAP) is comprised of two large-scale, interactive sculptures that are “activated” by a mobile exhibitions program. MAP is a collaboration of Peter Foucault’s Fal-Core Van and Chris Treggiari’s Mobile Store appearing in locations throughout the Bay Area. The partnership supports MAP’s goal to increase arts participation and deepen community engagement through the arts with innovative intervention at three neighborhoods street fairs and festivals in San Francisco and two events occurring at SOMArts. 


MAP creates autonomous exhibition spaces and reaches out to the public to promote strong creative and community bonds; an artistic research lab where a cross-pollination of
mediums and genres can occur. Events variously include video screenings, visual art, performance art, live music, interactive artworks, and culinary art. In essence, MAP builds a temporary, creative microcosm where community and creativity can intersect and flourish.

MAP is presented in collaboration with SOMArts and supported by a grant from the Creative Work Fund.

The Mobile Arts Platform is supported in part by the Creative Work Fund, a program of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund supported by generous grants from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and by the San Francisco Arts Commission.


For more information please visit: http://mobileartsplatform.wordpress.com/