Feeding the idea that local artists shouldn't starve
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Red Dot markets, sells NE Ohio art
Alison Grant
Plain Dealer Reporter
American painter Robert Henri once said that the only sensible way for artists to regard a life in art was as a privilege they were willing to pay for.
For Joan Perch, that notion has seen its day.
But the veteran gallery operator has no illusions about how tough it can be to go from making art to making a living at art.
Her answer is the Red Dot Project.
The nonprofit arts resource center, celebrating its first birthday tonight, is feeding the artistic part of Greater Cleveland's cultural food chain. The name comes from the red dot stuck on a gallery label when a painting has been sold.
Red Dot uses stacks of flat file drawers and an interactive Web site (www.reddotproject.org) that is a portfolio of Northeast Ohio artists. The goal is to make it easy and efficient for corporations, law firms, home builders and individuals to become buyers and collectors.
Red Dot's anniversary party is at the Wooltex Gallery at Artefino, next door to the organization's own exhibit space and office in the Tower Press Building on Superior Avenue. (The party is hosted by The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com, the Web site that includes The Plain Dealer's content.)
The art of some of Red Dot's 85 painters, printmakers, photographers, ceramists and sculptors will be on display.
Perch has little use for the idea that "exposure" of someone's work in a public place -- a restaurant or bank lobby, say -- justifies letting the business display the art for no cost. Nor is she a big fan of the perennial auction for this cause or that where the prize is a painting or print.
"Other professions aren't asked to provide their livelihood for free in such an ongoing way," she said. Instead, Perch, project director, and Red Dot's only other employee, Project Manager Christy Gray, want to sustain a visual artists' community in Northeast Ohio by making the profession better-paying. They launched their organization with a $30,000 grant from the Civic Innovation Lab, a Cleveland Foundation-financed group that identifies creative ideas likely to have a measurable economic impact on the region. The George Gund Foundation has provided $40,000.
Perch learned that in a regional art market, you can't rely only on advertising and foot traffic for strong sales.
She got the idea for an alternative approach from an artist-run Brooklyn gallery, Pierogi 2000, known for serving fresh pierogis and cups of vodka at its openings. But it was another innovation that Perch adopted - Pierogi's "Flat Files" project to make art available to a large audience.
A permanent set of Flat Files, now grown to include 700 artists, stays in Brooklyn. Additional sets travel on the road. A traveling set was recently on view at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Perch and Gray took the model of an artists' collective - members pay $75 a year to be in Red Dot - and bumped it up a notch. They make their stable of artists extra accessible by adding virtual flat files that clients can flip through online in minutes.
Red Dot is customer-attuned - a difference from what can be an intimidating experience walking into an austere, white-cube gallery in New York, artist Thomas Roese said.
Roese and another Red Dot artist, Nancy Richards-Davis, said Perch and Gray are educating people about becoming art collectors for their own homes.
"We in Northeast Ohio have exceptionally talented and top-notch artists, equal to what you would find in the Chicago and New York markets," Richards-Davis said, "and very affordable."
Gray, trolling for new buyers, has found an emerging market in home builders looking for light fixtures, ceramic backsplashes, metal gate and spindle work, a fireplace surround or custom features for a water garden.
Interior designers can use key words to search Red Dot's site for art with specific elements, such as a "circle" image that is "orange."
Red Dot also has teamed up with the office supply firm Business Interiors and environments inc. With a Red Dot portfolio at its St. Clair office, and a decorated showroom, clients can see the enhancement of adding art to their work environment.
Another venture involves www.4walls.com, where Gray is helping to roll out wall coverings with mural-sized copies of paintings.
"A lot of architects and designers say they would love to use local artists but it's so cumbersome to find them," Perch said. "When time is money and you're working on a project, you need to do it quickly."
Linda Bluso, partner-in-charge of Brouse McDowell's Cleveland office, said Gray was "unbelievably client-focused" when the law firm bought 10 paintings and photographs for its 16th-floor conference rooms in the North Point building.
Bluso and other lawyers got an electronic view of Red Dot art first, carried over on Gray's laptop. She brought several paintings on a follow-up visit. Then an art selection committee visited the Red Dot gallery, which is open only by appointment.
NextHome commissioned a Red Dot artist to make an 8-foot-long metal sculpture depicting houses of different styles for the lobby of its Westlake headquarters.
Red Dot also is forging alliances with nonprofits. It tapped into the 15,000-member Council of Smaller Enterprises, hanging artwork in meeting rooms at the International Exposition Center when COSE held its annual conference in October.
Red Dot will follow COSE into its new headquarters when it moves into the former Higbee's space on Public Square.
Perch is heartened by what she sees as a growing awareness in Northeast Ohio of the artist as entrepreneur.
The Gund Foundation's Deena Epstein, senior program officer for arts, said the foundation underwrote Red Dot out of an interest in making Cleveland an artist-friendly place.
"Red Dot has contributed to making a creative class," she said. Henry Adams, former curator of American art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, said studies show that artists improve a community's economic and cultural strength.
Red Dot is "trying to help artists at the lower end of economic viability," the Case Western Reserve University art history professor said, "which I suppose is most artists, in a way."
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