How to Run Your Very Own Artist Space

I recently attended Artists Run Chicago at the Hyde Park Art Center and I picked up a copy of these instructions courtesy of Deluxe Projects. I thought this would be something nice to share:

Instructions For Running A DIY Space

1. Fall in love with art.

2. Go to a party, a bar, an opening, a lecture etc.–anywhere where you can see art and find conversation. Get out of your studio.

3. Find other artists there who are as desperate as you are to explore the art world!

4. Hang out together, visit each other’s studios, get high, and share your secrets.

5. Talk a brutal corporate management company into giving you a big space at a reduced rent for a month.

6. Come up with a name that suits the show and create a logo that feels instantly permenent.

7. Spend every day and night sanding, spackling, painting and coughing up drywall dust. Paint your friend’s head!!! hA!

8. Realize that you are actually building a funky white cube with the earnest intentions of mounting an exhibition that will change your littler corner of the world.

9. Fall in love with your partners and their visions and their voices and their arguments and their felt and paint and foam and dirt and bricks and geometry and good, etc.

10. Open the show up to everybody no matter who they are or where they come from.

11. During the opening, let the summer breeze drift in through open windows while the city lights float in the night like electric fireflies. Realize that whoever you all were before this, you are all now changed and open and awake.

12. Decide to keep the shows happening in whatever way possible. Find a direction, a focus, a reason to keep falling in love with art and artists.

—Our Aim Is True—

Deluxe Projects

Push Pin Projects 0014

Danielle Gustafson-Sundell, Carrie Gundersdorf, Adam Scott and Andy Moore

April 2009