Muse to Muse: Collaboration in Making and Marketing Art
/By Constance Hale '79 and Malcolm Ryder '76
The Kasper’s Hot Dogs Building, ©️ Malcolm Ryder
“A work of art is never finished; it is merely stopped,” Leonardo da Vinci is alleged to have said sometime in the High Renaissance. What’s more, the master is also said to have cautioned that his work would have to create the audience it needed, rather than find one already waiting for it.
Over time, say about 450 years, Da Vinci acquired not only his audience, but also hundreds of thousands of agents and promoters. This development might suggest the work was “finished enough,” if not finished entirely; we can’t know whether Da Vinci had unfulfilled intention for the work as a vessel of his ideas.
Recently, two of us took da Vinci as a model—not so much in claiming the mantle of his genius, but in deciding to “stop” a work and let it go public and, with a pretty good nudge from us, start to create an audience for that work.
Who We Are
Let’s back up and introduce ourselves. Malcolm Ryder ’76, a member of the edgy 185v76 artists collective bred from Rosalind Krauss’ Visual Arts Program at Princeton, had pursued a career as a photographer while at Princeton and in the decade following his graduation. He then worked for another decade as an arts administrator (in photography) for the NEA, the NY Foundation on the Arts, and the NY State Council on the Arts. Then he paused his career as an artist, though he didn’t stop taking photos, until, very slowly, his work started getting an audience on Facebook and Instagram and caught the attention of one particularly interested writer.
That writer, Constance Hale ’79, had developed a career as a writer after graduating from Princeton, moving from poetry to short stories to performance pieces to journalism. Much of that journalism consisted of profiles of artists and photographers and had her publishing in places as varied as Wired, Smithsonian Magazine, The New York Times, and Hana Hou!, the magazine of Hawaiian Airlines. She also wrote six books. Then, 30 years after abandoning the genre, she edged her way back toward poetry.
During this time, she noticed Ryder’s Facebook posts, and they started talking about the photography in the short bursts Facebook allows, which Hale often feels work well for a heightened, poetic form of expression. The conversations moved to lunch tables and Zoom rooms, and they turned to the magic of street photography, the underlying themes of Ryder’s work, and some narrative ideas about how to retell the story of the home town they shared: Oakland.
Hale landed an assignment to write about all this for The Journal of Alta California. When the collaboration between journalist and subject saw its fruition in a bona fide profile (“Malcolm Ryder Trains His Eye”), the two kept talking.
A more ambitious collaboration—a book that would collect various series of Ryder’s photographs of Oakland, along with Hale’s writing—began in January 2022.
A Common Vision
While resisting the cliché “synergy,” Ryder and Hale realized early on that they shared certain interests and sensibilities (starting with the fact that she, the writer, loves photography, and he, the photographer, loves writing), and that they could harness each other’s experiences. Their shared fascination with certain themes also sparked the collaborative creative process. They began improvisationally, exploring how to “talk” about ideas with pictures from Ryder’s portfolio, discovering when their ideas seemed to match or influence each other.
The same synergy, they realized, is what can inspire improvisation across genres, such as music, physical performance, and fine arts.
They slowly started grouping Ryder’s thousands of images, with Hale bringing her editor’s craft to decisions about how to shape them into groups and how to build, refine, and re-frame them to fit a larger purpose (in this case, social history). This required conversations about the real meaning of the work being done and, increasingly, about the audience for the work and the impact they wanted to have. As a result, the two subsequently found resonant names for sections of the work (what started as Buildings, Yards, Streets, and the like eventually became “The International Boulevard,” “Homelands,” and other subjects.)
Ryder describes the synergy as a continuous, mutual influence during the creation of these groups. He has found that the groups made the pictures themselves stronger. After several sessions, this extended even into the initial moments of shooting new pictures, anticipating how they might be seen in changing contexts.
Hale describes the synergy as a concentrated brainstorming session, where free association, revision, and experimenting were all welcome, allowing the collaborators to continually influence each other during creation.
If Ryder played a role as photographer and caption writer, Hale played the role of interviewer and editor. Her experience as an editor was a key factor: she had a sharp eye for how a photographer’s idea, or a writer’s idea, needed to be shaped and delivered with an audience in mind—and with an experience for that audience in mind.
Rather than be overwhelmed by the scope of the project and the sheer number of photos, Hale suggested they start small and go public with a discrete collection. Hale slipped organically into a new role: curator.
As Hale began the process of co-curating Ryder’s show, she zeroed in on some of her favorite images of an abandoned hot dog joint, the Kasper’s Hot Dogs building, that Ryder had taken. This building happened to be located in a neighborhood in Oakland adjacent to her own. As she and Ryder sorted through images, she focused on ideas and themes connecting the images as a group. She realized she saw a metaphor for framing a whole set of pictures in a poem by Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
Critically, the idea of using the poem as a frame suggested the first audience for the work: writers! As it happened, Hale knew of a writers’ collective in San Francisco that was ready to exhibit art in its new post-pandemic space. From that point forward, theme, story, audience, and interaction became the four pillars of the show.
Compared to Ryder’s arrangement done solo, the exhibition Ryder and Hale worked on together ended up omitting some pictures, adding others in, and defining the sequence of viewing. As a presentation, the exhibition became far more cohesive. The exhibition became “the” work.
The exhibition, in its finished state, features thirteen images, one of which is a triptych. The images show how the building has changed over time as street artists and taggers have turned it into what they call “an outdoor art gallery for the disenfranchised.” The series, as it was ultimately staged, functions as a way to link street art and writing, images and text, pictures and story, politics and prose. Like the Wallace Stevens poem, the pictures function as a collage, a kaleidoscope, and a rumination on perspective—on how each of us looks at and understands the world in a distinct way.
For this first show, at the writers’ collective, they found another collaborator, the Italian artist Simo Neri, whose art they had seen at the Fall 2021 Open Studios event in San Francisco. Neri’s work had extensively gathered and artistically cast street writing and signage for years. After the three decided to become a team, they ultimately settled on Can You Hear Me Now? as the title for the show.
For the next show, in a public library in the same neighborhood as the Kasper’s Hot Dogs building, Ryder and Hale plan to de-emphasize the role of the poem The history of the building, as well as oral histories gathered from residents, will become the focus.
“The Island,” ©️ Malcolm Ryder
Tapping Each Other’s Experiences to Tap into an Audience
Hale and Ryder insist that the artwork is actually “completed” when it exhibits well in its intended location and for its intended audience, whether a group of writers or denizens of an urban neighborhood.
Matching show, location, and audience requires an additional form of collaboration: marketing.
Hale and Ryder investigated each other’s experiences in promotion and product management (given he is a former product marketing VP, and she is a conference organizer and former managing editor of major US magazines). The base tactic of the strategy they adopted together was to define a specific audience before doing anything else.
“What that does,” said Ryder, “is to immediately make you create a pathway from where you are now to where they are going to be.” In turn, he added, that map requires two parallel paths: one logistical and the other emotional.
The logistical path requires acknowledging that audiences will approach the work because of numerous different types of expected value. Desired value is, of course, their reason for paying attention.
“Successful attraction by art is, of course, an experience, not a claim,” asserted Ryder. “The thing to be offered, to be exhibited, is an agent of that experience. Unless you have already earned preferential status in an expanding type of audience, the default situation is that most potential audiences always have an alternative to you and your work. So, you have to figure out how to deliver the work into the places where they are already paying attention.”
He added, “An emotional aspect is this: some audiences will literally create additional audiences for you, but those additions may or may not correspond with what you as an artist were aiming for. This is exactly why having a producer is a critical success factor—the producer ensures you will shape the work to an audience. If you don’t know how to do that job yourself, you should find someone who does.”
Obviously, the role of studios, galleries, labels, channels, and the like is based on their combination of expertise in customer relationship building and product delivery. In this arena, marketing a production’s result has a very distinct challenge. It is not “readiness to deliver,” it is “competition for demand.”
One of Hale’s strongest skills is to transpose works that are based mainly on meeting the artist’s criteria for art per criteria that the art users will predictably impose. This might seem old hat to sales people, noted Ryder, but it is an essential and clarifying feature of collaboration as well.
Imagining New Audiences
Collaborative production is exciting because production becomes part of actually making the work, not something that happens only after the making is done. “Making” means there are options and limitations that apply regardless of what final audience the artist imagines.
Competitive marketing has to do mainly two things. One is to ensure that potential viewers feel that getting the chance to experience your work is their own idea. The other is to show why any difference between your work and someone else’s can be important to the audience. The potential audience then decides whether they care about that importance.
For example, a single given work can be important in completely different ways to a student, a worshiper, an interior designer, an art buyer, and another artist.
Hale first marketed Ryder’s show to a large group of journalists and professionals who involve social history in their own work. Her communications highlighted things that they care about, which they would see in the show.
“The show is frankly very useful to them,” said Ryder. “It talks to them about something; then they use the show to add to their repertoire of how they talk about that thing. So, they wind up talking about the show. It’s a win-win.”
For the next show, Ryder and Hale have started working with librarians to design different programs for adults and children. The librarians, in turn, will coordinate with school librarians and teachers and suggest that classes visit Kasper’s before arriving at the library. Hale will design interactive sessions in which the students could respond to the photograph by writing or drawing.
Satisfaction
If you’re lucky, you might wind up getting reviews of your work like this, from audiences, sponsors, and others who get to say whether it made a difference:
“Thank you again for bringing your beautiful work to the Grotto. We are looking forward to sharing it with many visitors, members and students in the months to come.”
“As members of the board of directors of The Writers Grotto, we wanted to thank you for displaying your extraordinary and beautiful artwork at our space. Many members have commented on how striking the work is, and how grateful they are to have access to it. It truly transforms our space. We extend our deepest thanks for your generosity in offering to display the art and your hard work in putting the exhibit together.”
“I wanted to thank you for your art at the Grotto. It's very lovely and when I had a class there over the weekend, my students really appreciated it. I am sorry I didn't make the opening, but I thank you for bringing your art to us.”
Leonardo’s “a work of art is never finished; it is merely stopped” inspired us. But in our case, we have found that exhibiting art causes the work to continue to evolve and surprise us. Audiences continue to teach us about the art, as they respond and allow us to see our subjects in ever new ways.
The Kasper’s Hot Dogs Building, ©️ Malcolm Ryder
Interested in seeing Thirteen Ways of Looking at Kasper's, featuring the work of veteran photographer Malcolm Ryder?
Visit the virtual gallery, with all the photos, captions, and accompanying essays.
Malcolm Ryder '76 is an Oakland photographer and management consultant, a designer and manager of NEA Visual Artists Fellowships Grants selection process, the former head of IT transformation at NYFA and NYSCA, and a former board member of Julia Morgan Arts Center and the Center for Critical Architecture/Art & Architecture Exhibition Space. As a photographer in the digital and VR era, he emphasizes camerawork on actual environments to develop what he see as the real-time apprehension of experience, especially where the ambient, ephemeral, alternative, or neglected is the differentiating feature of what is "ordinary" about where he is. He is also very anti-elitist about photographs.
Constance Hale '79 is a journalist and poet based in California. She is the author of six books, including Sin and Syntax, a subversive primer on grammar. She writes frequently about people and culture, for national magazines and the PAW. You can find her at sinandsyntax.com and constancehale.com.