March, 2020 - Feb, 2021

Passage Arts

Passage Arts was a digitally enabled gallery that focused on lowering barriers to entry, minimizing overhead, and working with underrepresented artists. It was the first form of the company that would ultimately become spring.art.

My Role

Strategic Planning, Team Building, Marketing & Branding, Partnerships, Sales, Operations

Platforms & Tools

Shopify, Mailchimp, TypeForm, QuickBooks, Google Drive, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom

Outcomes

Passage Arts gave me a better understanding of the frictions limiting traditional art business models and laid the foundation for our pivot into later algorithmic discovery and social marketplace models.

Project Overview

Passage Arts grew out of my frustration with the elitism and pretentiousness of the traditional art market, which keeps most people from engaging and prevents most artists from building stable careers. During this period I cut my teeth in running a business, building an audience, and developing a product.

Problem

Art Galleries are the primary way for artists to sell their artwork and build an audience, unfortunately they are also pretentious, technologically regressive, and geographically limited. The limitations of traditional art businesses make it so that most potential art buyers feel excluded from the market and only a small percentage of artists can find lucrative representation.

Solution

Passage Arts was imagined as a digital gallery that focused on young and underserved buyer and artist communities. By focusing our attention on digital audience building and logistic optimization we hoped to lower the overhead brought by physical gallery models, allowing us to market a larger number of artists to a broader and more diverse group of buyers.

Results

After several months of testing we were successfully building an audience, had several notable artist on our roster, and had successfully attracted our first few buyers. However, as we worked to scale our partnerships it became clear that this kind of direct artist representation was too complex, both practically and legally, to scale to the degree we needed to achieve our goals, even with significantly reduced overhead and logistics.

When we reached this understanding we had already been quietly working on the idea of an algorithmic art advisor that could help people discover new artists on our marketplace. We made the decision to pivot away from the higher-touch model to build an algorithmic art matching tool that could act as the networking agent for direct artist to buyer relationships.

Work Samples

An Instagram graphic calling for artist submissions to Passage Arts.

A promotional Instagram story graphic for artwork made by Avani Patel.

A still from an Instagram reel depicting Nalamakuikapo Ahsing taken from an interview uploaded to Instagram.

I slide from Passage Art's Deck describing our product vision.