Do not be fooled by the allure of floating frames. Yes, they match everything and you do not have to deal with custom mats or finding a frame that is just the right size, but there is a darker side to them.  They break easily and the hardware (if you want to call it that) is total crap.  A bonus to using floating frames with a hanging rail system is the hardware being visible in the frame, so it can look like wires, bars, or straps are growing out of heads or whatever is sandwiched in the glass.  I had to hang two shows using nothing but floating frames that were 16 x 20 and held together with cheap aftermarket chrome car door trim.  Needless to say three fell off the wall and broke and one broke from only its weight while being lifted. The glass was impossibly thin and the actual image was attached to a thin clear sheet of plastic.  NEVER AGAIN…

I know you can find fancy wood trimmed floating frames, but they suck too. Once you hang the frame with a screw, nail, frame hanger or whatever you are going to be able to see it. Not to mention the wall color is the the mat for the works, impacting which colors are highlighted in the content.

Floating frames are only suitable for use in homes where the entire contents were purchased from Ikea by people who don’t care or just can’t figure it out…never in a gallery. (editors note: I use to have Ikea credit card; make your own assumptions.)

My close friend Ro can stretch a dime like no other. She spends $25-40 per reception and it looks like $300 when she is done.  Her presentation of wine is one of my personal favorites tricks.

She buys whatever box wine that’s on sale or jug that may cost less per ounce and collects them for receptions. We both agree, it’s tacky to just set a box of wine on a table, not to mention this encourages wine-abuse by the patrons.  Instead she has a collection of decanters.

Away from prying eyes she fills several decanters with wine and brings out only one or two on a glass tray. The nicer the decanter, the nicer people perceive the wine… this never fails.  Also she only fills the glasses as people request them, or at most has three pre-filled at any given time, thus prolonging the life of the wine five or six times over.

Pro Tips:
You can get a glass wine decanter at the Dollar Tree for $1, or you can rummage around thrift stores and yard sales and collect a couple cool antique ones for under $10.

Glass wine goblets are cool, but don’t invest in them unless you feel like cleaning them all and potentially dealing with the Health Dept. If you do buy them, they are the cheapest at IKEA.

If you are pals with someone who has access to a beer and distributor, coax them into buying the damaged boxes for you. The damaged ones can’t be sold and typically cost 20% of retail.

NEVER put a box of wine anywhere the public can see it. Receptions are not lame sorority parties, not to mention it cheapens the art.

The nicer the decanter, the nicer people think the wine is inside.

One of my biggest pet peeves is going into a gallery where either the exhibitor or the curator has decided to “show them how it’s done” in regard to pricing art. Thanks asshole, “I didn’t know ‘how it’s done’ before you showed me.” Even though the average annual living wage around these parts is about $26K, I’m glad the cheapest thing in your gallery is $3,000, to let everyone know how much ‘real-art’ cost.  These are the mindsets that make galleries last about as long as whiskey in my flask at a chamber of commerce meet-and-greet.

Story Time:
Several years ago, there was a very large, very pretty gallery that opened up across the street from my old apartment.  The couple that opened it, spent top dollar on renovating this old riverfront warehouse. Their business model seemed sound and familiar – live downstairs, rent half and use the rest for gallery. However I don’t think they anticipated the heating cost for a non-insulated 8,000 sq ft. building in Appalachian-rust-belt winters and they had some serious attitudes towards the natives.  The first three exhibits were of well known local artists, except the normal pricing was tripled. This couple being from somewhere in the east-coast megalopolis, had come to town to teach us all a lesson about value (they actually told me that too). Needless to say, they sold nothing. Furthermore they engendered short-term disdain by the locals towards their own community’s artists.  The couple’s savings dwindled, the gallery collapsed, and they eventually turned the building into condos that some incredible douches purchased at a fire-sale discount.

Outside of a major city, everyone knows it takes diversified income strategies to sustain a gallery, selling art works alone rarely pays all the bills.  Depending on infrequent sells of a few really expensive works is a bad plan too, unless you don’t need the money. If you can’t or wouldn’t pay the prices you are setting for the works, who else would.

This aside, here is a good way to determine your gallery’s pricing schedule for art.

Nitty Gritty:
Figure out the living wage in your area. The Census website is good for this and settling arguments with friends. (warning: This is going to feel like an IRS form) Subtract about 35% for taxes and maybe a few bills and divide that figure by 24, now take that figure and subtract 55% from it. Now feel depressed for a second or two. Not only do you now realize how poor everyone is… including yourself, but you also know how much money people have in their pockets to spend on stuff.

While you are on the census website, get an age and income breakdown for your area and see the ages/income of the people living close to your gallery. This will kill your urge to market to demographics that don’t exist. A lesson no one ever learned in my home town; which is why it has endless closing businesses and tax-boondoggles for 36-65 yr olds, even though median age of the town is 20.4 yr olds.

The proportions of the pricing of your artwork should mirror the proportions of the income brackets in your community.

If 30% of your community makes $45,000 a year
than $45,000*0.65= $29,250
(multiplying 0.65 is getting the figure to be minus 45% of it’s starting total),

$29,250/24=$1,218.75.
(24 represents the average number of pay periods in a year)

This is how how much money 30% of your community has floating around every pay check to spend on bills and frivolity (like children and art). Chances are out of the $1,218.75, they are probably only willing to part with 45% ($548.44) of it for a quality work of art, and that’s for something they really like. Math and money mixed together make a prescription for antidepressants. Use you best judgement to tweak this formula.

FYI: I made this all up for me, but it works.

Also consider things like who has families on your area and the cost of living. People with families living at home do not buy art, and if they do it’s not the expensive stuff. Children and convalescents eat money (sorry of this makes people angry). Also high rent and over-priced homes burn up cash too. This is where you tweak the 45%-fun-stuff/65%-living-life-bills split on the final paycheck, it may be much closer to 15%/85%. This ratio also get more skewed with lower income brackets.

After you spend a night of doing this and plying through three bottles or a box of wine, you should have a nice pie chart and table of costs to assign to art. Excel formula maker or a smart friend can help you with this too.

As always, pricing for art should never be arbitrary. Artists have working wages just like everyone else. As a curator it’s your duty to find marketable art that fits the income table for your area and allows the artists to get paid wages they deserve or are at least comparable to the average living wage in your community.

Sorry to make your head swim with numbers.

Over the past couple months, I’ve installed a couple groups shows that were filled with way too much stuff.  Since I did not make the show contract directly, I had little recourse and just had to make do with the space at hand. It’s pretty common for galleries to host group shows sponsored and assembled by non-arts groups. It’s also pretty common for curators to run screaming into the night when they are given 260 mixed items, half of which have no hanging wires or are probably held together with toothpicks and hot glue …and the hosting organization expects it all to fit nicely in your gallery that now feels akin to the backseat of Volkswagen Golf.

Everyone always jokes that it’s better to have too much then too little so you can ween the worst stuff, but what happens when you aren’t allowed to ween anything? Ultimately you get creative and make some poor judgment calls.

You must give the the sponsoring-group, gallery sq. footage requirements.

Do not let them trick you or side-argue that they are just going to make a frame size and quantity requirement to fix it. This is total bullshit.  No one can follow that stuff and it just makes people more angry.
Simple instructions like:
-black frames only
-hanging wire required
-white mats only
-no larger than 11 x 14
-2 pictures per person

These rules will inevitably yield 26 plastic-foam Wal-Mart frames, 6 spray-painted dumpster frames that are sadly more sturdy, 14 multi-colored pastel frames time warped from 1985 and a mess of hideous mats and unframed crap …and maybe some crayola on canvas-board w/o explanation.

Then when you decide to thin the flock of the weakest fowl …inevitably…some sap, that has problems you can’t even comprehend, shows up to the opening and has a nervous breakdown that their work isn’t on display, after the director of the sponsoring organization promised them it would be center stage, flanked by ground Xanax and champagne.

This can all be prevented with the littlest requirement. Calculate your wall space and potential floor space (subtracting the area needed for walking around things) and give that to the organizing group. Tell them- however, many ‘artists’ they plan to feature has be divided by this sq. footage figure. The more artists they have the less space per person’s work. Let them deal with the other specifics. You can give them typical requirements (like the things listed below), but be aware no grown adult is capable of following simple directions (particularly educators).

Pro Tip: I know the square footage of my gallery and have a pre-made comparison sheet that has sizes and measurements on it already.

For example if your gallery has 1000 sq. ft of display space

12 artists = 83 sq ft. per artist = everything has to fit the footprint of a mid-size car per artist
14 artists = 71 sq ft. per artist = everything has to fit on a king-size bed per artist
20 artists = 50 sq ft. per artist – everything has to fit on a twin bed and a half per artist
30 artists = 33 sq ft. per artist -everything has to fit on a sheet of plywood per artist
40 artists = 25 sq ft. per artist -everything has to fit on a four cushion couch per artist

Put this in Word and make a table; maybe draw some pictures on the sides for illustration.

A year ago, I had a frenetic grade-school art teacher bring me a 12 ft .wide by 15 ft. tall quilt to hang for the county schools annual art exhibit. Nevermind that I had 200+ other items to put somewhere in 2500 sq ft of space and her one item was taking up 180 sq ft. of a wall.  She wanted me to buy a 13 ft. length of 1 in. thick black iron pipe to hang it. I told her “Let me take care of it, just bring the quilt over as soon as possible.”, curator speaker for ‘No way in hell am I doing that, just leave me alone.’

Black iron pipe has no functional use in a gallery unless it’s carrying natural gas or part of a solid framework.  It’s extremely heavy, has rust, and is coated in oil. If that’s not bad enough, it’s expensive.  Wood is a little better, but it has splinters, may require, sanding and painting; also wood is surprisingly pricey. Lots of fiber artists love using closet-dowels and various other round sticks perfect for poking turds, but when they get too long they tend to bow. Enter stage left, electrical-metallic-tube (EMT) conduit.  It’s dirt cheap, galvanized, light, and smooth. Other pipes cost more and are either heavy, have reactive surfaces, or bow (or all of the above).

EMT Conduit can be found at Home Depot, Lowes, any electrical supplier and lots of pipe stores. Best of all it comes in 10 ft lengths and starts at $2.18. Another advantage is that all of it’s connectors require only a screwdriver (they have magic screws that use flat head, philips and square), no pipe wrench, solder, flux or torch needed.

Needless to say I was able to hang the 40 pound quilt for $6 in hardware using EMT conduit. Also I was able to recycle the conduit for use with an outdoor banner several months later. Since it’s a tube you can stretch rope through it super easy.

Pro Tip:

Couplings and other connectors to EMT pipes are kind of pricey, so I collect them from buildings being torn down or places being renovated (no joke). FYI- If you get hurt or arrested while collecting them, it’s your own fault.

Also hacksaws work great to cut the tubes, but a cutoff tool like a rotozip work better.

So you have an artist who insist on mounting about 10 millions tiny things on the gallery walls, and they just can’t process that your wall is something slightly harder than concrete.  Great… Just great… One options is to use about $600 in Command strips which may or may not work, also they never come off clean after a month (not w/o a hairdryer). Or you could make a temporary surface.

Meet my friend, Dow Styrofoam  2″ x 48″ x 96″ Insulated Sheathing. Buy it at Lowes, not Home Depot. You want the blue stuff, the green sheets at Home Depot have too much texture. The foam cuts just like drywall. Just score it with a utility knife and break it. The breaks will be awesomely clean. Make sure to peel the plastic film off it and then you can start priming. The downside to styrofoam is all the layers of paint it’s going to take. I think the last time I painted a panel it took about five layers before it looked even and the blue was completely covered.

Chances are if your walls not drywall and you have a brain, you have a hanging system of some nature. The best part about these panels is their feather-weight and ability to be easily hung.

I recommend chopping a wire hanger as shown. Use lineman pliers, they give you more leverage when chopping the hanger. Also angle when you cut the hanger so you get a sharp eye-stabbing point. Then fold the cut parts into a U shape as shown.

Styrofoam panels in actions.

1. Conference tables -I don’t care what you cover them with, they are still conference tables.

2. Thriftstore end-tables and side-board. Your gallery is not your Aunt Edna’s parlor room.

3. Cardboard boxes -not even with paper taped around them (I’ve seen this three times, no joke).

4. Those white-people-IKEA-square tables (LACK – the name says it all).

5. Scratched up old plastic store displays.

6. Old jewelry store cases with the glass on the top and side and some weird 1970s fake wood sides.

7. Anything that has shiny brass chrome-like details on it.

8. wooden crates

9. milk crates with fabric draped on them.

10. Things made from chip-board plywood (the stuff used by cheap contractors and landlords for subfloors).

If you are creating and maintaining an gallery in an old building, which may have only gotten electricity in the 1930s (like mine), then your electrical receptacles are like rare yellow diamonds of lunar moon dust.

Track light outlet adapters are my inanimate best friends when it comes to working around this problem.

This is a link to 1000bulbs.com where these things are okay-priced. http://bit.ly/e0rux4

Now, I’m not advocating going behind a convenience store by cover of darkness (around 2-4am) and ‘borrowing’ some black milk crates. Let’s be clear, do not go to local grocery store loading docks, wearing a hoodie and run and take a couple (Saturday mornings, when the place is super busy), nor should you ever ask your friends working at these places to bring some more home. Those are crimes, even if they are rarely, if ever, punished. However, yard sales, garage sales, end-of-May trash around student apartments are great places to locate milk crates (let someone else do the dirty work). All they need is a little cleaning and they are ready for use.

Why are milk crates so great for a/v elements, you ask? Well, they have lots of holes for ventilation and bungee cords and are not too big and not to small.  Also the black ones are pretty inconspicuous when hung from a ceiling. I’ve also found that laptops and most cheap dvd players fit nicely in crates with the video projector and I still have room to cram some old Dell Harmon Kardon computer speakers (or other common, self-amplifying speakers found at every thrift store in America).

No projectors on the floor or at eye level thanks to the mighty milk crate.

Pro Tip:

Go to Big Lots, Dollar General, Family Dollar etc. and buy a container of mixed bungee cords. These are great for tying down the electronics so they don’t slip out. Also you can make a nifty sling in the crate with them to angle the projector if the crate cannot be tilted.

If you need to paint the crate, use some sand paper or steel wool (any kind will work) to rough up the surface a little. This way the paint will cover better. Also you’ll only need 1 to 1 1/2 cans of spray paint instead of two or three, unless you feel like splurging on specialty spray paint for plastic.

Framing is expensive. It doesn’t matter who does it or where you buy the frames.  Just the quantity of frames needed for an exhibition make the price sky high. Enter stage right, Mr. T-Pin.

People love to mount pictures on foam-board or glue them to illustration board with two mats, also group shows from-and-for non-arts non-profits inevitably give you canvas board creations (unframed).  When this happens you don’t really have that many options. You can try and use adhesive tabs and put hangers on the backs, but trust me, they will fail while some jerk is staring at them and the ‘artist’ will probably be popping by to say hi, three seconds after their work hits the floor …this is a universal law.

This method is only possible if you have soft walls (gypsum/drywall). T-Pins will not go in plaster or concrete.  Use the T-pins to build a shelf to hold the work. Then pin the top. Use pliers and a wire cutter to cut pins in half that will not go all the way through the wall.  Turn the T-Pins so the heads are vertical to lock the work in place firmly against the wall. Just make sure not to press so hard that you dent or damage the work.

Lots of T-pins were used here. An editors note, I hate stacking things ...HATE. Though sometimes it just cannot be helped and you have to make it work. Printmakers and photographers are typically the worst at self-editing. This show was a huge success over all but took near 26 hours to install.

If photos are dry-mounted on foam board this is a particularly effective tool. Just make sure the photos are secure.

Pro-Tips:

Fashion a thimble for your thumb, using some folded paperboard and masking tape. If not you will get bruises on your fingers that last for weeks.

Buy T-pins at Staples or Staples.com. Save yourself the pain of looking for them elsewhere. Just trust me on this one.

The tiny T-pins are good for nothing more than 4×6 photos.

Use pliers with the T-pin in the jaw as deep as it can go to get the hole started. This will prevent the pin from bending as quickly.

Also if a pin bends badly when you are putting it in the wall, just toss it.

USE A LASER LEVEL.