Point me to some great artist collectives!

June 11, 2011 10:09 PM

What are some good artist collectives that don't charge to submit?

After having my own website for nearly two years, I've finally started to bring in some revenue through prints sales these past few months. I want to continue get my pieces out there, and I'm finding the best way is to submit pieces to collectives, such as Gawker Artists.

So now the question, fellow MeFites, is what are some other artist collectives (online or physical) that don't require payment to submit?

posted by msk1985 to Media & Arts (1 answer total)

Best answer: The way you're using the term "collective" is kind of confusing to me. Typically, a collective is a group of artists who work together, either in real life or networking online or whatever, to produce work/organize events issued under the name of that collective (this is one example, here is another). They're not generally something you apply to be in, and very rarely something anybody would pay to be a part of.

What you seem to be after is a curated artist registry (some of these may be calling themselves "collectives" now, though I'd find that weird and pretentious), and you'd probably have more success searching for that phrase. These are places where, like Gawker Artists, you submit work and, if accepted, get usually an online portfolio-type page or have a selection of slides held in real life for curators et al to look at in person (I'm not sure if this is really still done, but it used to be).

While I was getting an awful lot of click-through traffic from Gawker Artists when I first submitted a couple years ago, that's dwindled away to nothing because I haven't bothered to submit new work to push myself back to the top of the pack, so that one is probably worthwhile, but you have to maintain your presence there. I have work listed in maybe half a dozen other registries and art-focused social networking sites—the former really don't generate much activity, but they're good for establishing a more robust online presence, I guess; the latter can be really good for boosting print sales (many have built-in "shop" type features), but, assuming that you're not already much of a known entity, you have to be pretty aggressive about promoting yourself on those (indiscriminately adding lots of contacts, spamming people every time you upload a new work, entering in all of the inane contests, etc).

Anyway, of the places that I even remember submitting to, I'm on the White Columns Artist Registry (pokey interface, has generated no activity, but is quite selective and has considerable history and a good reputation), ArtSlant (not curated), and Artnews (also not curated). There have been others over the years, but none of them show up in the first ten pages of search results for my name, so they can't have been all that effective. Off the top of my head, there's also Cargo Collective (perhaps they're to blame for the terminology weirdness) and CultureHall, which both operate mostly on an invitation basis. There are probably still tons of local slide registries which you could search out, but I have a difficult time believing that they're worth the effort. Still, it can't hurt to look.

As far as the social-network-plus-print-store model, the big ones (and you've probably come across them) are DeviantArt and Saatchi-Online. DeviantArt is a cesspit of bad manga drawings, and Saatchi-Online is a spammy mess as often as not, but some dedicated individuals, I understand, have managed to make decent money using these, so there you have it.

There are also companies that do curated print runs, which are really great. 20x200 is the most well-known, but there are others whose names I can't seem to remember.
posted by wreckingball at 8:26 AM on June 12, 2011 [1 favorite]