The Power of Taking an Online Arts Platform Offline
By Elena Soboleva, Curator of Special Projects at Artsy
As much of the world moves online, what’s next for engaging, enriching, in-real-life experiences of art and culture?
I’m Elena Soboleva, and I lead Special Projects at Artsy. I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to engage with artists in this changing cultural landscape, both offline and in real life. Artsy is the most comprehensive place to learn about and collect art online and a question I grapple with often is: how do we apply that incredible resource towards impactful, artist-led activations that our audience will go offline to engage with?
Version 1.0
Special Projects got its start in 2014, when we were offered booth space at partner art fairs, and would install iPads to share Artsy with fair visitors. After a few fairs we realized that we could be spending those resources differently. Creating site-specific, engaging experiences for visitors and collectors was a logical next step. For the pilot project, then called “Artsy Takeover,” we worked with Ryan Foerster at Art Toronto. The artist created a booth of found elements from his home city, which were paired with his photographic abstractions. After a wonderfully positive reception, we staged nine art and design projects over the next year with the help of the broader Artsy team, including Artsy Takeovers at NADA Miami Beach, FOG Design+Art, SP-Arte, Art Cologne, Art Brussels, Collective Design, and Design Miami/ Basel.
While these activations were a great way to showcase Artsy’s potential to produce memorable installations, we were still struggling to find a way to clearly explain the mission of Special Projects at Artsy, even though it felt like we were on the right path.
Offline Installation, Amplified Online
One of the most successful early projects was Hank Willis Thomas’ installation at The Armory Show 2015. Transforming Artsy’s booth into an interactive, text-based work, Willis Thomas engaged directly with the tension of commerce and art at an art fair, creating a retro-reflexive text on a wall and distributing tote bags emblazoned with his truism: “Art imitates life. Life imitates ads. Ads imitate art.”
We were able to amplify his installation digitally as well, through an editorial preview on Artsy, going in-depth on his practice, and providing a global platform for the artist. The article gained a reach of over 1.5 million impressions through social media shares. As he noted about the installation at the time, “You can call my work a call to action, or you can call it an indictment — or even a challenge.” Engaging with that challenge, both at the fair and digitally, is a good example of the online/offline approach that Artsy is well-positioned to take.
We realized that our greatest strength was not simply to mount shows and present existing works, but rather to offer artists the space and support to create temporary projects, freed from commercial pressures and with the primary goal of engaging a public audience. Additionally, the potential of Artsy’s global partner network was clear. With thousands of galleries on the site, our relationships allowed us to draw on a truly large and diverse group of artists.
Beyond the Fair: Art in Unexpected Places
When we started Artsy Projects, we focused solely on working with contemporary artists and designers to reimagine art fair booths. Then, we broadened that scope to “art world spaces,” which offered the potential of more ambitious programming. One of the first projects under that expanded scope was a collaboration with the emerging designer Misha Kahn, who created an exotic tiki bar on the roof of the SIXTY Hotel, in New York’s Lower East Side. Kahn’s installation, complete with whimsical furniture, oversized hand-blown lava lamps, vibrant tropically-themed wallpapers, and a polychromatic floor treatment, created a tactile design-focused environment for guests throughout the summer of 2016.
But Kahn was no random choice. Artsy had profiled him earlier in the year, and our Gallery Partnerships Manager and Associate Director of Design Alex Gilbert knew that he had resonated with our online audience and would likely excite our offline audience as well.
Institutional Insight
Branching out further, we have started to work with important art world institutions, such as the Whitechapel Gallery, a renowned East London museum. This past October, we were honored to collaborate with the Guerrilla Girls.
Their practice of critiquing the cultural and political establishment, advocating for diversity in the art world, and using data to underscore vast imbalances, felt especially well-timed and aligned with our goals. Working with Whitechapel Gallery, we presented an evening that spanned generations of female artists, with performances by Zadie Xa and screening of Alicja Kwade’s work.
Thoughtfully advocating for women in art is an issue that Artsy champions; this also resonates across our editorial pages in features like a profile of the Guerrilla Girls, a history of Cyberfeminism, and an article about balancing an artistic practice and motherhood. I’m proud that we’ve been able to work with incredible female artists including Betty Tompkins, Mira Dancy, Petra Collins, and Chloe Wise, all of whom have expressed strong engagement with notions of gender in contemporary art.
Thinking Broadly, Miami and The Future
Art Basel in Miami Beach is a major challenge, as it is both an opportunity to reach the largest art audience in America but, also a real test as you’re up against one of the biggest, most opulent social weeks of the art world calendar.
In 2015, we worked with the Nautilus, choosing to embrace that landscape with playful subversion of everyday objects, by mounting a multi-part outdoor installation of projects and performances. Artsy Projects: Nautilus featured a pool bottom painting by Katherine Bernhardt, Eddie Peake’s painting installed on a 58ft-wide roof that heeded a warning to collectors who may be “Destroyed By Desire,” and Mira Dancy’s reclining nudes, surrounding the pool.
The most challenging works, at least from a logistical standpoint, were Dan Colen’s granite M&M boulders, each of which weighed over 10,000 pounds and had to be installed by crane.
Despite the challenges, the result was a memorable group of installations, which were open to the public for that week and reached over 2 million people online.
This year in Miami, we were inspired by Artsy’s “Art x Science” value, and pursued a project at the intersection of art and technology. Virtual reality, hailed as the next great artistic medium, was a natural route to take. However, we quickly faced the problem of how to engage a public audience outside of the VR headset?
To find the solution, we began to research and work with Rachel Rossin, the New Museum’s first-ever virtual reality fellow, who had been profiled earlier this year exploring the depths of VR and creating environments.
Rossin’s new commission for Miami will fill Faena Art’s massive, beachside art dome alongside works by other renowned new media artists Jon Rafman and Jacolby Satterwhite. Collective Reality will incorporate 360° projections, motion tracking, and avatar puppeteering to immerse the audience, beyond the personal view of the VR headset.
Does virtual or augmented reality represent the future of art making? What role will advanced and evolving technology play in practices of today’s artists and artists of the future? How do we better enable contemporary artists to expand their practices, create engaging dialogues within the art world, and, importantly, reach new audiences through online/offline activations?
Artsy Projects, from an experimental beginning, has developed into an initiative that is well-suited to tackle these questions. Coupled with the exponential growth of Artsy’s editorial coverage, we’re in a unique position to produce insightful, impactful installations, and amplify those projects to a global audience. As we look to 2017 and beyond, the true scale and potential of Artsy Projects has yet to be fully realized.
