Philadelphia Gastronomy, Libations, and Art outside of the Gallery Scene
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Lemme tellya a thing or three
You have a website, or perhaps a tumblr or blogger or wordpress. Marvelous. You even update your resume as new shows and reviews come in, and you add images of new work and inform the public on sales. You’re rocking this web thing. But is anyone seeing it? Can anyone find you?
I’m kind of obsessed with tags and key words these days, because I’ve come to see how essential they are to sorting through the mass of information that is the internet. I was trying to look up information on a Philadelphia artist the other day, and I was shocked to find that searching their name and the word artist lead me to Art in Bars, which you know, isn’t so helpful since AiB was who was trying to find more information.
A buzzy skill these days is search engine optimization. Now, I have barely functioning coding skills, and if you’re not a code monkey yourself, you are in some ways limited as to what you can do, but never say never. If you have html knowledge, you already know how to create metatags for robots and keywords. But there’s always room for improvement in what you input as your keywords.
Imagine you are an artist in Philadelphia named John Circe. You do pencil drawings based on photographs of your friends wearing animal masks.  You also make sculptures out of pencils. This is your shtick.
It’s easy enough to get a handle of making sure your full professional name (John M. Circe) is included with any show you take part in,¬† or any image of your work you put on the internet. So if someone knows who you are they can find your website by searching your name, perhaps with artist or art if it’s a common name. But let’s imagine someone saw your work in a group show three months ago, didn’t write down you name, but has been thinking about how much they liked that art and wants to track it down. This is where key words become your best friend.
You need to think about how people who know you, who know your art, and have no idea you exist will find your art. Key word combination that should lead to you. Think specific. Of course use the terms Philadelphia, artist, drawing, pencil, art, but also think of the kind of drawings, the subjects, the materials and add those. Make up long strings of words someone might use to describe your work – weird drawings people masks, hipsters animal mask, Philadelphia drawing mask people, and flatter yourself.¬† Best Philadelphia drawing, really cool pencil sculpture, interesting drawings masks, new artists pencil really good. Always assume you want people to find you who don’t even know who you are, who have an idea of art they would like to see, and make sure your work comes up.
This assumes you have access to code to embed keywords. Let’s say as fancy as you get is a blogger site.¬† You have no idea what I’m talking about with keywords. Tags can be used the same as keywords, and should. Even if you post one image of a painting in progress, tag the hell out of it. Your name, the materials, the subject, the location. The robots of the internet use these words to find your page and suggest it to people who are searching the terms. The robots do not see pictures, they see words (this is why one can make an argument against artists having flash websites) then they look to see if the words in your tags or keywords match other words nearby (so you’re not lying about the content.)
The unsolicited advice: always when you put an image of your work on the internet, attach words to it. Lots of words. Specific words. And then the robots, and the art lovers, can find you.
How to pump your resume? The most obvious advice is to apply for juried and group shows. Try for grants, purchase prizes, and public and private commissions. Submit your work for anything and everything you are remotely qualified for. But don‚Äôt fall into the trap of throwing your money away on scam shows, such as those that are online only or pay-for-play. Read the fine print. There are many opportunities that are free ‚Äì paying for the chance to compete is not always the wisest decision as an emerging. Some good shows are free of cost and some bad ones have a very high entry fee. The point of these shows is the exhibition itself but also to use as a springboard and to boost your curriculum vitae, to parlay into the next exhibition. (more…)
Emerging artists are in need of expanding their accomplishments: unlike the standard maximum of no more than one page, artists are encouraged to list every little thing they have ever done. There are certain segments of the art world for which your curriculum vitae is as important as your work, and strong art without a strong resume isn‚Äôt given equal consideration. Unfair, but true. Some people make quick judgments based on length alone, before even reading the details. Once established beyond that a single page of accomplishments, only then should artists perhaps weed out the less auspicious appearance they’ve made.
Lemme tellya a thing or three
Names are vital in how you present yourself. I’m not getting into how important it is to name work (I’ve yet to meet someone for whom Untitled is an accurate reflection of the subject of their work – it’s a lazy argument for a lazy solution – but that’s another post) but rather your file names when you submit work. Think I’m being glib? The other day I sorted through over 50 discs of artist submissions to an upcoming show, and I can not stress enough how a little effort on your end will endear you to the lowly peon tasked with presenting your work to the higher-ups in the arts food chain.
Imagine you’re applying for, say, a popular group show at a local arts institution that requests a disk with 5 images and a resume, statement, and slide list. Your cd is going to end up in a pile with potentially hundreds of other artists, then most likely, all of your images will be gathered together for presentation. Let’s start with when I put your cd into my computer. The icon pops up. And what is it called? In my real world experience I’ve seen unnamed (implies you don’t understand how to perform basic computer tasks) the date the disk was made 12/14/09 (hmm, finished a day before the deadline – don’t think this is important, eh?) cutsy names that have nothing to do with the work PurpieX (seriously?), the name of the show being applied for Show Title (great for you, but I already know that I’m working on this show, so not the best choice.) So what should it be? Your full professional name (not Jo or Kitty, Joseph M. Smith or Katherine Cooper) the name you would like to have associated with your work and then if there’s room, the show being applied for or the body of work. Ah, I see you’ve named your disk properly. I have high hopes for you. Then I open up the disk.
 Lemme tellya a thing or three
as you may know, I like you. I want you to succeed. Either by doing your own thing your own way (coffee shops, collectives, out of your studio, whateves) or by breaking into a gallery. Every day at the gallery I work at, I interact with artists. And boy howdy, have I learned a lot about what one should and should not do to become part of the gallery system. Also, running this here little blog, I’ve tracked artists appearances throughout town. What that participate in, how they promote themselves. With all my keen observation, I’ve formed some options, which I would like to share with you in the form of unsolicited advice.
Today’s advice: Google it. It being you, yourself. Although yes, you should periodically enter your name into a popular search engine to see what comes up, I want to tell you about other free features you should be utilizing. You know when you land on google.com there’s a series of word on the top left, one of them being “more”. You should click the more, and then the “even more.” (more…)