Gallery Economics
First in a two-part series
With the US economy tanking nearly 40% last year, Greater Cincinnati art galleries haven't been exempt from the serious downturn.
Randy Sandler, owner of Cincinnati Art Galleries, estimates that business at his downtown gallery is off 50 percent since the stock market crash in September 2008. Marta Hewett said sales at her art glass gallery in East Walnut Hills have "dropped off by 33 percent."
Galleries, such as Carl Solway's and Sandler's, are responding to the crisis by selling art in venues outside their gallery walls. Others are reducing marketing costs, dropping art prices and pulling back on the number of exhibitions they schedule.
And the owners of the A & J Gallery over in Kentucky have radically rethought their entire art business to make their business more stable.
Sensing a decline in business a year and half ago, Sandler hired fellow gallery owner William Moseley to take some of Cincinnati Art Galleries' paintings on the road to other markets like New York, Los Angeles and Baltimore. Moseley has expertise in 19th and early, mid-20th century the very art periods in which Sandler's gallery specializes.
For each out-of-town show Moseley visits, he draws between 25 to 30 paintings from Cincinnati Art Galleries stock. "He could sell anywhere from zero up to a half a dozen," Sandler said.
Veteran art dealer Carl Solway also is planning to take to the road.
"We are going to have to be more assertive," Solway said. "Beginning at the end of March, we are going to start traveling again to other regions like Akron, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Louisville to reach collectors.
"We take art and rent a hotel suite someplace and invite the collectors in that community to come visit."
The dean of Cincinnati gallery art directors, Phyllis Weston, who has been in the gallery business for over 40 years, says normally the impressionist Russian art shows held regularly at the O'Bryonville Gallery she runs with Annie Bolling Rangeley and Cait Yellig draw well. But the latest show encouraged some fingernail biting.
Yellig said the December-January show sold only one painting in December. Finally, 12 or 13 paintings moved near the end of the run in late January including a big one for $20,000.
Foot traffic into galleries is down all over but that has not been an issue for Solway's gallery. It's tucked away off the beaten path in the West End near Findlay Market.
"We are a destination location," Solway said. But he adds, "we certainly have heard from some clients and institutions that they're wanting to hold back from making any commitments at all."
When it comes to the economy, Gary Gleason, owner/director of Hyde Park's Miller Gallery, is taking a cue from President Obama's stimulus package by planning a show he is tagging "Art Stimulus" opening March 13. It will feature lower priced art.
"Every artist has a few paintings they feel are some of their top work but they haven't sold. What we're doing is bringing those pieces in at a lesser price," Gleason explained.
These days, Gleason said many artists are willing to settle for lower prices on their work.
" I have artists who have lost galleries. A lot of galleries are starting to go. I have talked to two artists. One lost a gallery in Chicago. A couple of galleries have shut down in Boston. That has affected our artists."
Marta Hewett will also try to counter anemic art sales by introducing more reasonable prices. She has been showing the work of emerging artists.
"We really need to look to the young people who are doing work of quality and buy this work," Hewett said. "It may be a tenth of the cost of a piece by an established artist."
Nevertheless, there are artists who can buck the change if their names are big enough. Phyllis Weston said Frank McElwain's period Cincinnati scene series are selling well.
And Gleason said, "Stephen Bach's (the popular Cincinnati landscapist) price always has been relatively reasonable so he is maintaining his prices."
Beyond dropping prices and touring art, gallery owners are showing almost as much creativity in developing strategies to survive as the artfulness contained on their gallery walls.
"The website is probably my largest asset. It is 50 percent of my business," said Hewett, who has upgraded her site using David Harpe's crisp photography to showcase her glass art.
Some galleries are cutting back on the number of exhibitions per season. The Miller Gallery is doing fewer solo shows and more group exhibitions.
"All of our shows are minimally three artists," Gleason said. "It's difficult in an environment like this to put too much on to one artist. You want to broaden it out a bit so you have more potential for selling." .
Galleries also have instituted significant cutbacks in marketing costs.
"We are doing much more email-related invitations and promotions," Gleason said.
Hewett, too, eventually will turn almost exclusively to email for promotion of art shows. For flyers and postage, Hewett says "it costs me almost $2000 to send 3000 pieces."
But perhaps the most dramatic business plan has occurred over in Florence, Ky., at Janice and Allan Smith's A & J Gallery. Noting signs that overhead in their gallery was eating up their income, the Smiths decided to refocus their business from selling art to framing it.
"About a year and half ago, because of what was happening in the economy, we decided to kind of semi-retire," Janice said. "We did something real different."
Two years ago in May, the Smiths moved to an office building complex in Florence, Ky., from the gallery they ran for 21 years in a strip mall on Mall Road also in Florence.
Using the customer base they had developed over the years in the art gallery, Janice and Allan established an interior decorating service that includes more custom framing and less art for sale.
"It's just a very small replica of what we had years ago," Janice said. "By cutting back on the overhead that you have with a larger gallery, we don't have to depend on the sales volume or need it.
"It was the best thing we could have done for ourselves and still stay in the area to help our customers who were faithful to us."
Despite such an unsettling sales environment, some gallery owners remain optimistic.
Weston said her partners and she are planning to expand with a second gallery-the PAC (Phyllis, Annie and Cait) exhibition space for contemporary art located in East Walnut Hills..
"It's risky to do at this time," Weston said, but she said she and her partners are going ahead with plans for an April opening, anyway.
And Solway remains staunchly philosophic, "the so-called recession provides an opportunity to rethink how we have been working and what we are doing.
"We are going to try and look at it in a positive way. We plan to reconnect with people that we haven't connected with for a long time."
