Artists Get The Business

One of them learned how to be less shy, to network, and how to price work. Another finally got her website up and working. A third got an emotional lift just from sharing with colleagues the struggles and solitudes of the profession. A fourth decided to clock how many hours she spent in her studio.

A fifth set a simpler yet daunting goal: Just clean out the darn studio so you can at least get in the door. How else to get some work done?

Those achievements, both modest and major and spanning the business, technical, spiritual, and housekeeping sides of art-making, were topics of lively conversation at last week’s opening reception for ​“Make. Art. Work,” the new group show at the Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s Sumner McKnight Crosby, Jr. Gallery.

The show, which runs through Sept. 4 on the second floor of the Council’s 70 Audubon Street building, features the work of eleven artists, both established and emerging.

They all participated in the six-month long eponymous program that, in the Council’s description was a ​“comprehensive training program for visual artists in Connecticut … that addresses essential business and entrepreneurial skills … within a supportive peer environment.”

The program is in its third year but, according to Arts Council’s Executive Director Cindy Clair, this is the first edition of the program in which the artists, strutted their entrepreneurial stuff by organizing and mounting a culminating exhibition themselves, from selecting the work, to advertising, to laying out the tasty tuna sandwiches and red wine featured at the reception.

They did well.

The show contains sculpture, collage, photography, watercolors, and oil and acrylic painting. It includes artists at the beginnings of their careers, like Cayla Lockwood (pictured above), as well as established ones such as Corinne McManemin (pictured here), a drawing teacher at Creative Arts Workshop.

McManemin confessed that she is the one who got her website functioning. She also praised one of the unique qualities of the program: a monthly pairing of the artists with a ​“lift partner,” that is, another artist who coaches the first artist in fulfilling her goals.

McManemin’s ​“lift partner,” whose name shall not be revealed, she said, was the one who just wanted to get her studio cleared out. This mission was accomplished.

In addition to upgrading her website, McManemin cited getting more up to speed on learning how much ownership she has of images, even after they’re sold. ​“I loved learning the legal part. I was curious to learn about copyright and ownership even of work I’ve sold,” she said.

All hailed the Arts Council program on the career and business side of the art profession, but all derived different benefits.

For a younger and self-effacing artist like Terryville-based Vanessa Braucci, the ​“Make. Art. Work” program has made a big difference.

“I had some difficulty learning how to make connections…. As someone who’s beginning, I learned to ask for help, how you’d price your work and market it,” she said.

Braucci was not alone among the artists at the reception who faulted their art school training for not teaching the business side of the profession. ​“They tell you how to do it [make art], but not how to get it out there. As you’re getting closer to graduation, they should give you some advice,” she suggested.

I was curious to know whether a program that focussed on the business side of art-making had any effect on the art side of art making. Did the participants now feel a little business birdie sitting on their shoulder, saying in their ear as they worked: ​“Will it sell? What’s the market for this work?”

McManemin, along with commercial illustrator Liz Grace and botanical photographer Ellen Hoverkamp (pictured), were adamant that the work itself — that is, the aesthetic choices they make and the ways they worked — were unaffected by the business focus of the program.

Hoverkamp cited the collegiality as the program’s biggest asset. Grace said she was grateful because the program and especially the culminating show goosed her into getting some work done.

The program seemed to have had a deeper effect on Braucci, or at least the media she worked in. Though she had done some digital photography beforehand, she had mainly expressed herself in painting. Thanks to the program, she decided to show only photographs for ​“Make. Art. Work.”

“It bumped me out of my comfort zone,” she said.

After the exhibition, she plans to stick with the photography, she added.

Other artists also showing but not mentioned above include Elena Gerard, Kiara Matos, Ivan Tirado, Lee Walther, Linda Wingerter, and Beth Klingher, who was the central organizer of the exhibition. A sampling of the artists in of ​“Make. Art. Work” will also be on display down the street at Koffee? at Audubon and Whitney through July.