The Alliance
Home
The Alliance
Councils
Accomplishments
Subscriptions
From the Director
Volunteers & Credits
Contact
Exhibits
Gallery
Resources
Library
Programs
Artists need to sell their work to survive as artists, but they are reluctant, sometimes unable, to pay commercial companies to present portfolios of their prints on the internet. So we have been experimenting with an internet gallery. Even with only a handful of artists represented in 1998, there were hundreds of user visits at the site and artists were offered solo shows, regular gallery contracts in addition to their print sales. We have expanded and redesigned the gallery to be more democratic by being less expensive, offering all artists the opportunity to show original prints, paperworks and artists' books at our cost if they subscribe to the journal. By making it so inexpensive, we can include hundreds of images of prints, paperworks and artists' books, bringing curators and collectors to the site more often and directly helping the artists by encouraging sales. And the gallery has become a much more valuable resource for education — for both the general public and schools, which often have had to buy expensive slide sets that include few prints — and only then by a very few acclaimed artists, rather than actually surveying the full range of exceptional and culturally diverse work being created today.
We designed a Print & Paper Fair in November 1998 as a prototype for similar projects to be held all across the country at which artists would present their own work and be available to the public to answer questions. Artists and the community benefited from the direct contact as well as the sales opportunities, and we offered demonstrations and hands-on activities that are never present at the large dealer-run events in New York. We chose the American Museum of Papermaking as our partner because it presents the model of a small "local" museum with outreach programs. We will work on improvements in publicity and activities each year and make the information available through our councils as a model for similar festivals everywhere. Similarly, Printmaking Dialogue Days are now regular events in Georgia. Our first two (at Agnes Scott College in Decatur in 1997 and Wesleyan College in Macon in 1998) were very successful in creating a new sense of community among Georgia's printmakers and particularly in treating students in print and design arts as future professional colleagues. We are now arranging our third Dialogue Day for November 1999 at the Savannah College of Art and Design.Accomplishments
Timeline
Exhibitions
Publications
Information Resources
Organization, Governance & Diversity