Expert Art Industry Insights for Emerging Artists

Episode Transcript:

Susan Hensel  00:00

The reality is that all these galleries who say they will not ever look at portfolios, they always need new talent. And there is so much talent outside of the key centers of New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris. There's tremendous talent out there that they're missing out on. And so I see the online world as being part of the way to show more artists to a larger part of the world.

Isotta Page  00:35

This is art is…a podcast for artists, where we brainstorm the future of the art world and the creative industries.

Susan Hensel  01:01

I'm very, very happy to be here with you. I know that we played a bit of the contemporary version of phone tag trying to get this set up. I'm Susan Hansel, I am a multidisciplinary, basically textile artist, I work in three dimensions with digital textiles as well as manual processes. I've been at this a long time, but not always in textiles. I studied at University of Michigan, back in the 1960s, toward the end of the Vietnam War, a time of galvanic change in the United States. And when I came out of University of Michigan with my BFA, I knew how to paint I knew how to make sculpture and sculpture was my primary major. It's where my love is in the three dimensions and and materiality. And I came out and I basically said, so now what, and I was working in clay at the time, and my attitude toward why I made work remains pretty consistent. I was working in porcelain, mostly functional dinnerware. And my goal was to provide an experience to the client, whether that client was just observing the work or using the work and I wanted them to have kind of an aha moment that would make them stop, maybe take a deep breath, and have their attitude toward what they were doing changed, as we all have to eat every day. And what happens when you have that food on a beautiful plate? When you have that coffee in a beautiful mug? How does that change your perception? And does it make what you're doing? Special, possibly sacred? When you're with other people? How does it affect everybody's response to things? It sacralized is it it makes it more human. And I worked in clay for in street festivals because they were everywhere then for about 20 years. But as my work change, the street festival wasn't the place for it. And I began sending workouts to competitions and a small galleries. And eventually, as does happen with me because I am materially driven. I love materials, Clay was no longer the right material for what I needed to do. And I needed to be able to communicate in the next section of my life somewhat more directly. And I got involved with handmade paper and artists books. And those are the artworks of mine that are on collections just all over the world. And I had the same attitude still, which was I wanted to provide an experience. And it's kind of as a little bit of a sly experience, because it's political foundationally I will not beat somebody over the head to have them agree with me. But I will provide a story in an interactive environment because artists books are interactive, you have to manipulate them. How sculptural is that that's lovely. You have to manipulate them to get to the content. And I always left the content as open as I could. So the viewer would own the story and provide their own conclusions. And my goal was to get the meal somewhere in the ballpark of what I was thinking. But because they were allowed to own the story, then that story stayed with them no matter what. And to read an artist's book again, you have to slow down. You've got to stop what you're doing. And look at it, feel it, smell it, read it and have that experience. And then things happen. I moved to Minneapolis which is a book art center, but I Oh and probably my third gallery here. And this gallery was devoted to the story, and especially to political stories. And it wasn't in person gallery for many years, like nine years, I think. And because of running the gallery, somehow or another, my words left the building. And I started working in installation art, and sometimes words wound up in there. And certainly, all kinds of lovely media, I learned to do sound processing, I learned to do video processing. And I learned to collaborate when I really needed the help. And because there was there's some things really I don't know how to do. And that was just phenomenal. And then another set of ideas started bubbling up having to do with aging, and you know, installations, obviously, are about experience. And again, the experience, very much like the books was to insert people into the story of whatever was going on, so that they could identify themselves in it. And pretty soon I was working on issues having to do with aging. And that took me back to drawing media of all things, but yet on an installation scale. So one of the major pieces I've ever done was a truck piece that actually is portable, I shipped it to several venues that is now in a college collection in Florida. It's called the arrows and fine Atos project. And it's like, I don't know, 60 feet of drawing something like that. So that a process like that, but it's always been the media leading to guide the content. So when the content changes, the media tends to change. And now I'm still seeking experiences for my clients, for my viewers, but I'm doing it in textiles, which just shocks the heck out of me, I never expected to become a textile artist. The story is Zalta is a kind of a weird one. It's I laugh, even thinking about it. I discovered digital embroidery, which is designed in the computer and output to a computer aided machine so it stitches hands free. Big deal. Well, I discovered this when I was at the Minnesota State Fair. Now. Yeah, we've all seen baseball caps with embroidery on sweatshirts with people's names. So I never really thought about it. And I turned a corner in one of the buildings where they're demonstrating new products. And I saw a big Donald Duck being stitched out, hands free. And I really didn't care about Donald Duck. And I really didn't care that it was hands free. It was the color. Donald Duck's MIDI shirt is blue, right? He's based on a naval uniform, but it was the bluest blue is bluest, ultramarine blue I have ever seen in my life. And it just stopped me in my tracks. And I had to figure out how to get that. And I started applying for grants and loans. And I had to get the first machine on alone. A grant got me the first digitizing software. And there was absolutely no training other than how to put Donald Duck on your shirt that I didn't want to put Donald Duck on my shirt. I was doing an installation based on survey, instrument and costumes that we all wear to work in and what that clothing means. And so I was taking all of this text I got from people all over the United States about what they wear to work and what does it mean, what does it hide? What do you not share? What do you share at different ages. And oh, I just barely got it done because there was no training. After I got that done. I took out another loan after I paid off the first machine and I switched to a PC computer because the software for Macs was not very functional. And I invested in PC software and a somewhat larger machine. And then I finally really got comfortable with the process the process of digitizing as rather like smashing together Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. Now I'm pretty good at Photoshop, but I'm really really lousy at illustrator. It never makes sense to me. So it took me a while to get the drift. But with the digitizing software, you are making objects like you do in Illustrator, but like you do in Photoshop, you're filling them with different kinds of things. So I'm filling them with stitches, and I can choose all kinds of stitches but a stitch Really, it's just a stitch, it's two points with a line, simple geometry, no matter what. And any circle is really just an approximation, because it's the points with little stitches. And I began to understand the geometry of it through playing around and messing around, truly messing around, like, on the beach, even with things, I figured out that I could use the color that I was stitching on, and then stitch gradients over it that would interact visually with the background and stitch other gradients over that in another direction, which would then give you a vibrant color mix. And at the same time, I figured out that I could design these things with permanent folds, so that the color mixes would shift as you looked at them. And there's some physics to that. And the physics is that the thread is triangular in cross section, and it scatters the light. And when light is scattered in different directions, the hue range gets changed by the light scattering. So it was phenomenal to learn that through experimentation. And from that, I was able to begin to build larger sculptures by working with modules that I would output from the computer. And then that led to yet another machine, that new machine that I have is a eurycoma. And it has a 48 inch wide hoop. So I can make modules that are about 20 inches high by about 42 or 45 inches wide. So that's a large module. And that sounds all very, very technical. And it is, but the part that is highly intuitive about it is that number one, because I'm designing it, I can do anything. Number two, I can stop the machine at any point and say, Oh, I'd like it at this point. And then I can combine these materials that I output from the machine. With other materials, which indeed I do. I combine it with woodworking I combine it with just armatures sometimes is what the woodworking is, but I've been carving walnut lately, and covering three dimensional objects with the textiles and working at different levels on the wall. So that we have a very rich environment where the experience is, frankly, almost confusing for the viewer. Because it's such an unusual looking object, it's unlike anything else that you've probably seen. And as you move by, especially the folded pieces, the color moves almost like the of those Times Square electronic billboards where you walk by and you see one thing, and you walk in the other direction, and you see something else. And it's done through lenticular technology. But it's cool because I might use three colors, including the cloth, but I'll get six or eight colors out of it just simply because of the physics of light. You know, digital is really only the first step to what I do. You know, once I've designed the image that I want to start with, after that it's all experimentation and hands on. And sometimes I'll go back in even while something is in the machine, and digitize an additional thing that I want to stitch on top of what is there. And people often ask me, truthfully about style, and I'm never sure what to say about style, part of the influence on what I do. Over time, you'll begin to see not only the stance of, of providing experiences that allow people to own the images or the words in some way, but also that experience of peace and of slowing down and of helping to create the world as we want to see it. But the other thing that will sneak through is an Asian influence. Because my family for one year did live in Taiwan when I was a young adolescent. And it not only opened my eyes to the greater world, which was always something for adolescents, but I soaked in the imagery deep into my psyche. And then when we came home after that year there where my father taught for a year on a sabbatical, we came home through basically the capitals of Europe which was also wonderful, so I came home with a larger world View. And when you really look at my work, you can see the influence of Asian and Middle Eastern composition and color on a lot of the things that I do. And I'm interdisciplinary, I really think because I was trained fundamentally as a sculptor. And when you're a sculptor, you are all about materials, and about how materials work. And I draw well, but I'm not a particularly good painter, I'm not particularly good with two dimensional design. But what I am good at is materials, I can pick up a material and begin to manipulate it and know very quickly what it can do. I've been a gallery director, probably on my fourth go around now, my first gallery business, it was a gallery and teaching business with two other artists in Oklahoma's Michigan, we thought we were going to be teaching adults, little did we know, adults, what are their children to be taught. So we taught a lot of children's programming, but we also ran a small gallery in the space. And I was the artists with the most computer skills. So I was doing the graphic design, the catalog design, and the marketing. And that was my introduction to what it takes to get information out in the community. And after that, I joined another group of artists, again was three of us. And we were interested in bringing installation art, book art, and performance art, to the East Lansing, Michigan area, these Lansing, Michigan is, by the way, a college town. And so we opened the art apartment, which literally was in an old kind of apartment in what was probably ultimately a boarding house, above the businesses. And we got tremendous coverage on the television, even in national media. And that's where I really built up my chops on these things I started collecting, not just client emails, because I'd been doing that for years, it was obvious to me that all artists rely on people coming back or telling other people about what you do. So you got to be able to send them postcards, or emails or all of that. And when I started in the gallery business, it was all postcards. So nobody had email then. And you had to collect all these addresses. And I just did it obsessively for years. And I looked up the addresses on arts, publications, newspapers, televisions, and at that time, we would do a combination of press packets, and faxes like the day of a show, you'd send faxes to the TV stations. And if they had interns that they needed to keep busy, they'd send them to the openings, and we'd get covered. So that was interesting. But you know, none of this, I mean, None None. None of this was taught in school and trying to figure it out was pretty wild. But the information is out there, if you're willing to take the time. But it should be easier I noticed is that in your bookshop, you've got most of my very favorite art business books, you really do. And those weren't published until really a few years ago, like art slash work, I think is one of the best ones out there. There's a lot of good information. And there's a lot of just cliched information, but it takes persistence and research. And if you don't have the skills of research, if you're in a college town, you might be able to get an intern to help you with that. You'll have to direct but it's a matter of doing the deep Data Dive online to find out and try to keep up with who are the publishers who are the reporters who are the writers of the publications you want to be seen in. And you're part of the reason I developed this Susan Hensel gallery here was because I was moving here. And I only knew a few people. So my first inspiration was to get to know more people. And the other part of it was the art department had closed and I wasn't quite done being a gallerist I had more to offer. I really love being a gallerist but it's hard to balance with studio practice. And now the gallery I shut down the in person program maybe as much as five years ago because I really needed the space for my studio practice and I love both but I couldn't manage both in the same space but during the pandemic when everything shut down again, including 100% of the shows I was scheduled to have. I decided it was time to return to the gallery business but to do it online only and And the way that came about was, not only was I noticing that there were more online shows, but I had started to develop my own online shows as a way to highlight different areas on my website. And I marketed them as exhibitions. And so I applied social media, email, and everything I could think, to get them covered. And then more and more places were doing online shows. And I decided to go yet further. And I've discovered that artsy.net, which I've been reading, and looking at, for years, had a kind of a new category for the smaller gallery to rent space on there. artsy.net was founded, it was the first online marketplace for bricks and mortar galleries. And it was founded to allow for a broader international reach for galleries that did not or could not travel to what was then a smaller art fair system, or who just wanted to expose their artists to more people in more ways. So you could think of it as being the back room of a gallery, that they might have an in person show, and they might put that up on artsy, or they might put even more up on artsy than they did in person. For me, it has been online only with the exception of my shop windows. And if my artists are local enough, and all but one really are local enough, I show them in the windows, my one artist who's 500 miles away, I don't put her in the windows, because I don't expect her to ship that far. The other thing I plan to do with artsy is I will be doing probably some pop up shows, and capsule collections going forward. But this has allowed me at this juncture of this long career to represent some Midwest artists, to the greater world. Which brings up one of my pet peeves in the art world, the art world business not only is opaque, but it's very parochial. It's very centralized. And the way you get into the blue chip galleries in the large and wealthy art centers, is you must attend the openings, over and over and over again until you find a way to talk to somebody who is part of the business and say, Oh, my Yes, I am an artist also. And I come to all your open is oh, your program is wonderful. I'll see you next month and do this over a period of years. And then maybe, just maybe they'll do a studio visit or take a look at your portfolio. Well. The reality is that all these galleries who say they will not ever look at portfolios, they always need new talent. And there is so much talent outside of the key centers of New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, there's tremendous talent out there that they're missing out on. And so I see the online world as being part of the way to show more artists to a larger part of the world. Because let's face it, I live a $400 airplane ride from New York City. I can't fly in every weekend to go to openings. Nobody could. But my artwork is valid and the artwork of my stable of artists is valid. And we have a little bit of a different point of view in the Midwestern area. It just has LA has a somewhat different point of view. And one of my other bugaboos about the lack of transparency in the art world also is the treatment of artwork as an asset class. Most artwork is not asset class artwork. I mean, most artwork is not an investment that's going to fund a foundation or retirement for your grandchildren. But when it's treated, like that kind of commodity, it makes it seem inaccessible to the ordinary viewer. And the other thing that happens is the secrecy issue. If art is supposedly an asset class, that's the only reason I know of And then money laundering that we have things like free ports, I want them to get rid of all the free ports artwork, of the, that's the expensive stuff goes and lives in free ports never leaves the free ports. And it just gets traded within the free port. And no one ever sees the artwork. And that's not the function of artwork as far as I'm concerned. And another issue for American artists anyways is the secondary market. When we sell our artwork, we lose all financial interest. And when it is resold, whether at auction or any, or through a gallery, we don't get any percentage back, even though we were the originators. And I know, at least in some of the European countries, there are laws to pay artists part of that resale. And I know it's complicated and it's an additional expense for the businesses. But it's a it seems terribly unfair. You can find me at Susan Hensel projects.com. And that's kind of the gateway to everything. All of my work is on there. And I really encourage you to read my blog, because I do talk about art, business and art motivation a lot on there. And from there, you can certainly find me on Instagram Susan, underscore Hansel underscore, multimedia underscore artist on Instagram. And if you just search for my name, you will find I think approximately three of us and two of us are artists one is in St. Louis, Missouri area, and the other one is a gaming commissioner in the gambling industry. So you'll find us

Isotta Page  26:51

thank you for listening to art is a podcast for artists. Please leave art is a podcast for artists a rating and review on Apple podcasts. It really helps others find us. Also I would love it if you took a moment to reflect on who in your life might also benefit from listening to this podcast. When you do please share artists a podcast for artists with them so we can continue to grow the show organically and brainstorm the future of the art world together. You can also support the work I do by subscribing wherever you listen, and by donating to the podcast. The link to do so is in the episode description. Okay, that's it for now. Thanks so much and see you next Wednesday.