Gallery Shows Online

A few of the galleries I have worked with, most notably including Altered Esthetics in Minneapolis, Minnesota, have taken to posting pictures of their exhibitions online so that anyone can see them. Cranky Yellow did this for the Crammed Organisms show as well. I think this is great, especially within those groups that show national and international artworks in group show settings as opposed to just local ones.

The biggest benefit is that those artists who cannot attend the reception or see the show otherwise can still experience it in some way from afar. Many artists do not have enough of a travel budget to attend all of the non-local group shows that they participate in, and that's okay. By offering an online photo album, galleries invite those artists, their families and friends and everyone else who may be interested to see the show.

This is also an excellent means of documenting past events, since after the show the gallery will become a clean slate for the next exhibition. Typically, little evidence of the show that was there will remain after it has come down. (Some of my institutional critique works deal with this often abrupt changeover.) However, by keeping an album of past shows, the gallery can use this information as a means of enhancing, promoting and even funding future programming while maintaining a record of past events.

So I think that posting exhibitions online is a great direction for art organizations and institutions to move in. It increases exposure and involvement and allows the group to keep a thorough record of what has happened. Hopefully we will see more of this as more organizations have web savvy members who are willing to get involved to make these albums happen and as more simple and straightforward hosting sites are created online for people to post albums to.