Art Center’s new artsite allows artists to display up to six works for sale
Susan Hurwitch, a mixed media and collage artist in Sarasota, tries to sell her work and budget her time.
Not necessarily in that order.
“Most artists spend 70 percent of their time on marketing and 30 percent on making art,” she says. “That can be frustrating.”
That’s one reason Hurwitch jumped at a chance to join the artsite online gallery just started by Art Center Sarasota. For $175 a year ($100 for members), along with a 35 percent commission, people can have six works of art shown at artsarasota.org/artsite.
This means participating artists don’t have to worry so much about things like social media, website traffic and search engine optimization.
“That’s part of the appeal,” Hurwitch says. “That’s something they’re going to do.”
Danielle Dygert, exhibitions and marketing director, updated the Art Center Sarasota website last year. The next step was adding an online gallery.
Visitors to Sarasota gave her the idea.
“People would always ask me how they could see more work by a particular artist,” Dygert says. “I didn’t know what to tell them.”
Now she does.
The Art Center website hosts the online gallery. Staff members maintain and update images and information about works for sale. When snowbirds return this fall, participation should increase.
“We’re trying to get as many artists as possible; it’s lucrative for them and us,” Dygert says. “If we got 50 to 70 people, I’d be stoked. If we got over 100 people, we’d have to add another full-time person to run it.”
Booker High roots
Dygert, 26, is a Sarasota native who attended the Visual and Performing Arts program at Booker High School. (She was elected student body president, too.) After graduation, she studied architecture at the University of Florida before earning a degree in fine arts from New College of Florida.
She took a job as receptionist to get her foot in the door at Art Center Sarasota.
When Sarah Veldez left Art Center for a job at Artsy — a big online gallery, incidentally — Dygert became exhibitions and marketing coordinator.
The Art Center website now draws more than 2,000 new visitors a month. Artsite should help it grow. Artists can change the selection of their work every three months.
“More than 75 percent of our online audience is comprised of new users who find the site when searching for ‘art in Sarasota,’” she says. “That’s clearly a potentially lucrative market for artsite artists. We want to put Sarasota on the map as a destination for the visual arts in an emerging digital market that transcends borders.”
Artsite in an arts town
Hurwitch, 63, retired to Sarasota because she was looking for an arts community in Florida.
She’s a Miami native who worked in the Washington, D.C., area for more than 30 years. She was a tech-savvy medical technologist who always had side businesses. Her daughter is a former schoolteacher and photographer who built a business doing online photography lessons.
Hurwitch belongs to organizations such as FLAG, the Florida Artists Group, and WCA, Women Contemporary Artists. She created her own website — susanhurwitch.com — but it draws only a fraction of the traffic of something like artsarasota.org.
“That’s one of the reasons I thought artsite was so great,” she says. “I love creating and selling my work, but I face the same struggles almost all artists do.”