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Exciting!  Another player on the subscription scene, St. Paul’s Springboard for the Arts and mnartists.org have teamed up for a hyper local version of this idea to support local art, artists and collectors.   Over the course of 3 months, collectors will receive 3 boxes containing (I think) three works each.  There are 9 artists who will be commissioned to make an edition of 50 and the cost for a share is $300.  It is pretty exciting to see that their network is so involved that they sold out in less than 12 hours!  And they are already taking reservations (for a $100 price) for the fall season.  Similar to Art in a Box, they will have local “Pick up Parties” at different art organizations, furthering the feeling of being part of a community.

From their press release:

The goals of the CSA program are to support artists and to create a community of engaged local arts supporters.  CSA supports artists: in the creation of new work, to establish relationships with local collectors and patrons, and to participate in the launch of an exciting new model of art support and distribution.  CSA Share member benefits include multiple works of art from local emerging and mid-career artists at a fantastic value! Additionally, CSA Share members have the opportunity to develop relationships with the local artists and art community, discover new artists, explore a variety of disciplines and support artists’ careers and a vibrant community.

We’re very excited and honored to have been interviewed by Brian Andrews of Bad at Sports and to show up in Art Practical.

Click Here to read the full interview

The audio version of the interview will be released on Bad at Sports on this Sunday 4/25.

We’re honored to be included in this roundup by Emilie Raguso of Oakland Local of Art Subscriptions in the Bay Area.  There’s starting to be quite a number of us! It is really wonderful how this idea is spreading, and people are making it their own.  Thanks to Emilie and Oakland Local, and Welcome to any new visitors!

TPG #11 artist Helena Keeffe has teamed up with Amber Cady to start Alula Editions, a new art subscription whose focus is to work with artists to create repeat patterns for textiles. They collaborate with individual artists and also organize participatory group drawing activities in order to create textiles that defy expectations and move beyond purely aesthetic considerations.

They have an Open Call for Submissions with a deadline of April 28th, and artists receive a $500 stipend.

Starting off with a bang, Alula Editions was a recipient of this year’s Southern Exposure Alternative Exposure Grant, will be collaborating with artists in Portland, Oregon to create the official tote bag for the Open Engagement Conference at Portland State University, and will be printing their first edition as part of a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

They haven’t figured out their pricing structure yet, so subscriptions are not yet on sale.  But you can get on a mailing list so you will be the first to know when they are.  The first work is projected to go out this summer.

Welcome Alula!

Know what I have been a little delinquent in doing?  Charting the growth of art subscriptions.  I’ve been doing it in my head, but now I’d like to finally share with you just what has been happening in the world of art via subscriptions.

1. Papirmasse

#5 May 2009 by Kirsten McCrea

“Papirmasse is a magazine, original art, and social experiment rolled into one.”  Papirmasse is a monthly edition that gets delivered quarterly.  It is a poster-sized double sided print folded to fit in a 9 x 12 envelope.  For the most part, one side is an image and the other is mostly black and white text.  The limited edition prints are numbered at 1000 and are signed by the artist.  It is a project created by Canadian artist and illustrator Kirsten McCrea.  She seems to create much of the content, though there are certainly many other artists involved. Somewhere between an edition and a periodical, this subscription only costs $60 per year which is pretty sweet.  As she puts it, Papirmase rallies under the slogan, “Art is for Everyone!”

2. Art in a Box

This monthly subscription run by Compound Gallery in Oakland is unique in a few ways.  First, it only uses local artists from the Bay Area – mostly from Oakland and San Francisco.  Second, the art that you get is original pieces, not editions.  I’m not sure exactly how it works, but the large group of artists that they use all produce a few pieces each month and then the whole lot gets divvied up, so each subscriber gets something different and unique each month.  Third, because not everyone is getting similar stuff, subscribers have the ability to state their preferred medium of artwork.   And lastly, one does not have to sign up for a full year at a time, they only require 3 month increments.  It is a higher pricepoint, however: $50 per month unless you want to pick it up at the gallery (then $30 per month).

This model could be a quick platform for artists to get a little exposure and probably get somewhere between $10- $20 (I’m guessing) per piece.  This may not be much, but it does encourage artists to have deadlines, try out new ideas and still get a little pocket change for it.  From the gallery’s perspective there is much less organizing, as they aren’t the one producing the projects.  Because it is very locally focused, I also like that they have “Pickup Parties” where people can get together, get their art, and probably meet the artists from time to time.  The art subscription model can be adapted to fit so many styles and configurations.  Some might classify the art that comes out of this subscription as verging on  “Dude/tte art”.

3. The Thing

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to write about these guys.  We even traded subscriptions with them.  Ah well: THE THING Quarterly is a periodical in the form of an object. Each year, four artists, writers, musicians or filmmakers are invited by the editors (Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan) to create an everyday object that somehow incorporates text.  They also sporadically produce other projects, some of which they send out to the subscribers as a bonus, and some of which they sell or give out to other people.

I really like how they invite a wide variety of creators to contribute projects, but my only criticism would be that the pieces come so out of context, that sometimes it is hard to figure out how they fit into the artists’ work as a whole.  Because one of the joys of art can be the connection with an artist’s ideas and perspective it would be great to get a little more insight into the creator’s general practice and trajectory of their work.  The limited scope of the project, everyday objects that somehow incorporate text, is an interesting parameter.  When we first started The Present Group, we would explain the project and get a lot of confused looks and bewilderment in general.  Now, we run across that much less often and I contribute a lot of that to The Thing.  Their success in the media has definitely helped to spread the idea of an art subscription and they have gotten a lot of people to start collecting and supporting artwork.

Invisible Exports, a gallery out of New York, is getting into the subscription game.  They’ve invited 12 curators from all over the world to choose one artist each to create a limited edition to be sent out to their subscribers.  Their price point is higher: $2400 for the year (including shipping) and it is limited to 50 subscribers on a first come-first serve basis.  They are promoting it not on the tails on the artists that will be chosen (subscribers won’t even know who will be on the roster until the edition arrives at their doorstep), but instead on the tails of the curators – whose bios you can peruse on their website.  Their tagline: “HAVE MUSEUM-LEVEL TASTEMAKERS CHOOSE WORK FOR YOUR COLLECTION”  It seems as though the works will be mostly prints of one kind or another at the 17 x 22″ size- but they allow for the possibility of alternative formats.

Info on the AMC (Artist of the Month Club) here.

I have found two examples (via Exposure Compensation) of artists taking cues from the art subscription model as a way for a community to help fund their work and then reap the benefit of that support.

Dalton Rooney has started a Print of the Month Club.  He’s got some interesting ideas: tiered involvement- you can sign up for 3, 6, or 12 month intervals, and he allows subscribers to occasionally skip a month if they aren’t interested in that month’s piece.

CStein is trying out another method- he asks for a monthly $10 payment support, and then at the end of the year you can get two prints from a selection he puts up for subscribers, or you can apply your contribution towards buying any other of his prints (though they are typically more expensive)

The power of collective support can be huge- and subscribers reap the benefit in lower cost works for their collections.  Hooray!

Xiu Xiu‘s Jamie Stewart (a frequent collaborator of TPG9 artist David Horvitz) is selling subscriptions of past ambient, experimental, and minimalist works.  For $100 Stewart will send you one CD per month for a year.  The edition is 50 so they’ll probably go fast.

thanks andy

In the spirit of transparency we’ve decided to show you where all those subscribers’ dues go.  Below is the financial breakdown for TPG in 2008.  A few things we noticed:.

• 2/3 went to our core business: Making art, paying artists and getting it to our subscribers.
• 1/3 went directly to creating art
• 18% went to artists and critics.

Compare that to the traditional gallery model where an artist must recoup his or her production costs and profits through their cut of works that may or may not sell.  Through the subscription model artists shoulder less risk and art supporters funds are used more efficiently.

Here’s another art subscription! When we first envisioned The Present Group, we thought that if we were sucessful, then other people would emulate us and there would be a ripple effect causing a whole wave of different art subscriptions- all with different interests and groups represented. Though I’m not sure we’re ready to call ourselves a complete sucess, or that we can take credit for an idea that surely is in the air, the idea of the art subscription does seem to be a catchy one.

Here’s the most recent one we’ve found:

Little Bird Limited

Their wording is a little familiar, I have to say, but all in all we’re excited to see the art world expanding to reach more people at a lower cost. Welcome Little bird!

UPDATE: Just got an email from Little Bird:

We noticed the present group on our analytics site and when we clicked the link we noticed your blog post.
We were mortified to read about the similarities. We actually pay a freelance local writer to write out our press and content for the Littlebird Limited. So we had no idea. We read all about your subscription and re read what we had written and there is no doubt that the person who wrote for us ,for sure borrowed your text. We apologize for this, truly. We are currently working to change our text . That was not our intention to start our press like this. Although the text is the same the idea is not as grand as yours and we hope maybe to get to that level and we hope you take no offense.

TPG7 + (almost) 2 Year Retrospective Show Release

Just learned about a group called These Birds Walk. They are a small publisher out of Oakland(!) whose goal is ‘to provide affordable art books that quietly exist somewhere between a discarded pamphlet on the street and a high end coffee table book’.

It’s a little bit hard to tell what the deal is from their website, but they do offer subscriptions to four photography books distributed throughout the year. I am not sure if you can only buy them in the four book sets or if you can subscribe and start your subscription at any time. The first year resulted in a series entitled ‘The Kin Series’(link no longer works 10/09). They are just starting on their second series.

It is neat to find similar ideas all burgeoning around the same time. It seems like their subscription series started right around the same time as ours.

Today was spent editting together the artist interview DVD for TPG6. For the first time seeing the whole project come together I was struck by how lucky we are to do this. TPG really is a conduit between artists and art lovers, and our job is to maintain it. It’s so fun to watch what comes through.

This was a question from an audience member at our talk at the Headlands. The idea was that many art collectors cherish the uniqueness of the objects they possess, and although some TPG editions consist of unique pieces, this is not a requirement for TPG projects. The moderator, Natasha Boas, fielded the question by noting the importance of the artist multiple in art history, as a way for artists to make money and spread their work among influencial collectors. As we represented the “least traditional” art model in the discussion, here are a couple less traditional ways to look at the question.

We view each artist’s project as the art piece, so the fact that each subscriber will not always receive a unique object is not necessarily our greatest concern. It is part of our agreement with the artists that the project will not be reproduced, so each art piece represents a connection between a specific artist, a specific group of subscribers, and a specific place in time.

Or to look at it another way, during the talk, Julio Ceasar Morales, co-director of the Queen’s Nails Annex, mentioned how his goal was that the art community would support the artist space as much, if not more, than the individual artists they represented. In both our projects, the framework for experiencing and creating art is as important as its individual parts. The framework is an artist’s work too. No one would ever argue that the social space and community Julio has created is less ‘special’ than the physical objects for sale. In fact, a convincing case could be made to the contrary; that it is more visceral, engaging, rewarding, and possesses a greater capacity for change.

Voting for TPG7 commences now! We’re exploring the idea of a more inclusive art world and harnasing the power of collective decisions.

Check it out here.

We’ve got five great candidates. And even if you can’t vote, this is an opportunity to familiarize yourself with 5 new artists and their work.

I found this paragraph in Alice Waters’ new book “The Art of Simple Food.” She has such a lovely way of viewing the way she buys food, but I was struck by how she could just as easily be describing art produced through the subscription method. Just replace ‘farmers’ with ‘artists’ and you might not be too far from a vision of a future art world.

“When I started shopping at farmers’ markets, one of the best things about the experience was meeting farmers and learning from them – and influencing them, too, by asking if they could grow vegetables and fruits that has almost disappeared from commerce. After years of this weekly connection, I realized that I had become dependent on a family of friends – and they were dependent on me. By choosing to buy food grown locally and sustainably, in ways that are healthy and humane, I had woven myself into a community that cares about the same things. As a community, we share not only a commitment to protect our natural resources, but an appreciation for the value of food itself, a love for its taste and beauty and the deep pleasure it can bring by connection us to time and place, the seasons, and the cycle of nature.”
-Alice Waters