Showcasing and selling the work of emerging Philly artists
Queen Village gallery wants to make art accessible to the entire community and also supports free art classes.
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SARA McCORRISTON, 27, of Queen Village, and Jason Chen, 29, of Bella Vista, are co-founders of Paradigm Gallery & Studio on 4th Street near Fitzwater. The commercial gallery, which opened in 2010 and moved to its current location a year ago, provides space for local artists to display their work and also sells the art. It also provides studio space for artists and free art classes. I spoke to McCorriston, a graduate of the University of the Arts.
Q: The startup money?
A: We put our own personal savings in at the beginning and reinvested revenues every single month for the first four years, about $50,000.
Q: What's the biz do?
A: We encourage artists to take over the space and make it their own, so it's kind of an installation space with works by multiple artists and the space totally changes when we have different shows. We work mostly with local artists to promote and sell their work. We also host free art classes where people can come in and learn a new skill with artists. The third thing we do is collaborate with HaHa x Paradigm Magazine to do art scavenger hunts as well as hire artists from all over the world to do street projects.
Q: The biz model?
A: We sell all the artwork in the gallery. The artists get 50 percent of the sales price and the gallery gets the rest. At this point, we are reinvesting all the money back into the gallery. Both Jason and I have other jobs: I do freelance curating, art advising. Occasionally, we pay ourselves a 5 percent commission on sales. We also sell at art fairs.
Q: Your customers?
A: We have a range of buyers, everybody from college students to celebrities. One of our more recent celebrity purchases was by Swizz Beatz [hip-hop recording artist and record producer who's married to R&B recording artist Alicia Keys]. We met him at Art Basel in Miami, where we were promoting some of our local artists. The price range in the gallery right now is $40 to $7,000. We have local buyers, but we sell a lot of art around the U.S. and internationally. We have a lot of online sales, and whenever we have exhibitions we have collector previews, so we'll send out catalogs.
Q: The biggest challenge?
A: Running an art gallery is definitely a labor of love. Figuring out the Philadelphia market and making enough sales to be sustainable and also making enough sales for us to do this full time. It's difficult to sell certain price points here. Once a piece costs in the thousands, it gets trickier to sell.
Q: What's next?
A: I expect to double revenue this year. The business supports itself and we are moving from simply being sustainable to setting profit goals.
Online: ph.ly/YourBusiness