Crimson and Gold Connection; Business of Art Gallery

Welcome to Crimson and Gold Connection, keeping you connected with the people and current events at Pittsburgh State University. This is the Crimson and Gold Connection on 89K RPS, I'm Fred Fletcher-Fierro. Just in time for the holiday shopping season, there is a new pop-up art gallery that will open up this week at Block 22 in downtown Pittsburgh. The gallery is a result of a class taught by Pittsburgh State professor as Portico Bowman, called the Business of Art. Recently I spoke with Pittsburgh State students, Jensus Alvarado, a senior from Wichita, and Brianna Cooks, a senior from Fearson, Kansas, who are enrolled in the business of our class. I first asked them to describe the class and what they had learned from it. I think basically it is like self-promotion.

The whole class is about preparing us after we graduate, getting our business cards ready and getting our websites ready, learning about copyright and taxes, all the background information of being an artist and how we can use that in our future. Now both of you are seniors here at Pittsburgh State University, and you're both art majors? Yes. And when I talk to our majors, I always wonder, have you always been an art major or did you start off as something else? And as you grew up as a student, you became an art major. I actually started as an art major and have decided to veer my path off towards psychology. When you enrolled in this class in the first day, how's your perception of business of art? How has it changed over the time since you've just gone in this class? What have you learned from it as the class has gone along? I think I just realized how much more work was put into it, how much more research you have to do. It's not just, I'm going to make my art, I'm going to sell it and then that's fine and dandy. There's a lot of stuff you have to do prepared of that to make sure you

do it right and to get it to the right people, the right audience, the right price, making sure that you're pricing it the right way, valuing your art in the right way. It's all very like, very informative and I'm very happy I took this class. I will say that watching you, it also seems like it's a little nerve wracking because there is a lot to do. You know, we go into the store, we have the prices on the shelf. I mean, as consumers, we don't really think of what's something costs, but I mean, essentially as an artist, you're a small business owner. Making into this class, we actually thought, oh, make a small business when really there's so much in to making a small business that you kind of miss all those little steps. There is a lot to making a small business. I've spoken with the people at the Kansas Small Business Development Center who you're working with on this project. Before we started the interview, you mentioned you've been working with Mindy Lee. Yes. Mindy has been very helpful with us. She's been helping us with advertising our artwork through social media, helping us fit our website in the way that we needed to do. So it's

appealing for a viewer to look at artwork online. She's been very helpful. She even helped us with our business plan. We had to make a mock-up of a business plan for this gallery and to be able to make an actual business plan was difficult and itself and she helped a lot. When I've spoken with her, everything through the filter of a business, especially small business. So I think this was an important collaboration and speaking of small business, was MPICs that helped with this project? How were they involved in it? So we actually got to have a few of our classmates go to MPICs itself and try to have them sponsor our prints. So now we have some prints, our bigger, everyone who the digital art got to have their bigger prints at a discounted price. And we also get I think 25% discount for the rest of our lives through impacts. And that's very nice. They helped us a lot there. We're making little thank you cards as well. And they all provided that for free. It was a lot of money.

Sounds like a lot of money. And I mean, that's an example of a local company here in Pittsburgh helping out students, helping out the university through this really like a sponsorship. Now they are class in the collaboration with the nice people of the Kansas Small Business Development Center here at Pittsburgh State located inside of Block 22. Why do you think it's important to learn about the business of being an artist? Isn't art that people like and that people are going to buy? Isn't that art going to sell itself? I think it does make you think more. You should always make art for yourself, but you also have to think about what your, what the consumer would want to. How is it better applied to them? What can I do to make them want to buy it? Smaller prints, thank you cards, stickers, giving more options to them than just making one big artwork like a gallery and thinking that someone's going to pay $1,000 for one big painting. Trying to find easier ways for more people to access it. The name of the gallery is Glory Days. It opens up on Friday, December 6th from 4 until 8 p.m. at the Foundry inside of Block 22 in downtown Pittsburgh. Tell me about the

art pieces that you've created or somebody else that's created art down there and I'm wondering if the business aspect of this art class has made you reconsider just art in general. So our professor presented us the project as a commission from the Foundry and she gave us the topic of Pittsburgh. It has a lot of old photographs for when it first started and trying to use that as your inspiration. So our mission was to make artwork that would not necessarily focus on campus anymore but more as Pittsburgh as a community. So what would appeal to the community rather than just guerrillas? So each of us would do different things. Our friend Caitlin Maslin, she did a piece on Pittsburgh from the 1915 and what it looked like. And then 1960s because she remembered how downtown looked like at some point before I got torn down and she knew that anybody who grew up in Pittsburgh would remember what that

would look like. So she made art piece like that. So something like that kind of makes us think what would, if we were ever commissioned, what can we do to appeal to our customer? And not exactly to what we want because our slogan is bringing Pittsburgh of the past into Pittsburgh at the present. All right. I want to thank you for your time this morning. Thank you. Thank you. I was speaking with Janice Alvarado in Brianna Cooks, both seniors at Pittsburgh State University about the pop up our gallery that is set to be unveiled this Friday at block 22 in downtown Pittsburgh. The art gallery is a result of the art of business class being taught this semester by Pittsburgh State Professor S. Portugal Bowman to learn more about the art gallery, the class, or to hear this interview again, visit our news blog at krpsnews.com. I'm Fred Fletcher-Fierro and you've been listening to the Crimson and Gold Connection, a production of 89.9 K-R-P-S.

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