And *POOF* A New Show!
In school, you have to ask permission for everything. Can I go to the bathroom? Can I write my book report on this book? Am I allowed to work on homework right now? When it comes to the gallery, we can pretty much run with an idea as long as it's a good one and it doesn't cost a million dollars.
It kind of amazes me how quickly an exhibition can come together. Sometimes our Co-Directors will be having a casual conversation about something like Netflix original horror movie, Velvet Buzzsaw, and then they just decide they want to do a fine art haunted house show, complete with a Halloween bash. (True story, guys.)
For those of you who haven't seen it, the movie is about art world elites who are haunted, and then (SPOILER) killed by pieces of art. Needless to say, I'm very excited for this one. It's going to be called art of darkness.
Our curator, Tony Natsoulas, has been out of town, so I've had the opportunity to work on the formative stages of shows like this one. Unfortunately, the lifespan of an exhibition can be over a year, so I won't be here to see them actually up on the walls, but between the work I've done on these and previous exhibitions, I've become familiar with the whole process.
Although bringing an exhibition to life takes a lot of forethought (we usually start the process a year in advance), gantt charts and other schedules make it fairly easy stay on top of all the work that must be done in the following months.
The main tasks are to write and post the artist calls so that people can apply (that's been my job lately), picking the pieces that will be shown, install, and opening/closing receptions, and deinstallation. In between major tasks, we pretty much just update the website, party plan for the receptions, and try to get the word out about the show though local news, email, real mail, and social media.
So a lot of work goes into planning these things, but we've gotten the process down to a science so that it feels less overwhelming and maybe just a little bit magical.
