Sunday, August 14, 2011

Happy 1st Anniversary, Local Artist Interviews!




August 2010 saw the launch of www.Local-Artist-Interviews.com. It began with a reposted interview with Emma Berg from City Pages. Basically is was practice to see how an interview would look online.


Posting the weekly interviews on Local Artist Interviews has been a rewarding experience for me and I hope for you as well, whether you were interviewed, ran the gallery where an artist was featured, or were just a fan of local art.



In February, LAI held a "contest" where artists would submit an interview profile using the standard LAI questions, and a panel of jurors would review the interviews for content and rate them. Margaret Wall-Romana and Alison Hiltner were standout interviews from the contest. For contest prizes, LAI asked organizations like the Walker, SooVac, NEMAA, NAC, Bloomington Theater and Art Center, and many others to provide at least 2 memberships to their organizations. Two or more memberships were requested because one membership from each place would go to the Grand Prize winner. Nearly 50 total organization memberships were given away, with 13 going to contest winner, Margaret Wall-Romana for her extremely informative interview.



In the past year I got to learn more about a number of artists I was unfamiliar with and became a better person having experienced their work.



Check out these guys. They are just some of my favorites:







































Some artists have had more artistic success than others, and some have more talent than others, but the goal of this website has been to increase the exposure of Minnesota artists regardless of their level of success. If you have a show to promote, I would like to help you promote it with an interview. Check out the questions and submission process and send me your interview.



If you want to work out an arrangement like I have with Altered Esthetics where I feature an artist from each of their shows, I would like to talk to you too.



One of the results of having this website is that with the 75 or so interviews online, there are links to over 400 Minnesota Artist websites. If you want to learn about visual artists in Minnesota, Local Artist Interviews is a good place to start.



I would love to hear your feedback and your experience with LAI. I'm looking forward to many more years of working together with Minnesota artists and galleries.



I would really appreciate it if ya'll could spread the word about the site, maybe even check out the Facebook page.

1 comment:

margaret gamache said...

Happy first year Birthday Local Artist Interview !
thanks much for being there
marge gamache