This Is Art: Learn, Create, and Share

This is a business plan for an art gallery I’d love to own one day.
        With most art galleries and museums the only art that is displayed is drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, and maybe, JUST MAYBE videography.
        I want an art gallery that showcases all art. I’m talking about poetry, acting, dancing, music, comedians, fashion design, etc. This is all art to me and I believe there should be a place where it can ALL come together.
        In my gallery I’d love to have themes/events. For instance perhaps during February we’d display art that represents black history, or dancers would choreograph an interpretive dance, film students can make short films on the subject, etc. Also think in terms of October for breast cancer awareness, or a freedom theme for Independence day or 9/11. It’d be nice to, with the exception of whole themed months, to possibly have each week in a month dedicated to a certain field of art; like week 1: poetry, week 2: painting, week 3: photography, week 4: dancing. Of course some fields would intertwine with others and I don’t have that all mapped out yet, but that brings me to my next point. I would also like to see artists collaborate. An example if a poet read one of their poems and a dancer choreographed a dance to their poem or if a musician played an original song and a painter drew what they felt the music was saying. I want to build a community where all artists can come together. Collaborations and displaying their work is where the “share” part in the name comes from.
        The “learn” part of the name points to teaching. If at all possible I’d love to start this venture with my best friend, Janyce, who is an artist in her own right. With her being the painter it would be great to have her teach art a few days a week to anyone who wants to learn. I don’t see it as being a regular class where people would pay X amount of dollars for 12 classes or something. I see it starting off as a pay for each session type of thing. As time goes on and if there’s repeat students, then maybe I could vision a play for a lump sum of classes off the bat. I would teach about poetry and writing in general. The thing that sucks about this is my old friend Melissa was heavy into photography. I’ve had the idea about this gallery for some time now and I had always envisioned Janyce, Melissa, and myself starting this together. No worries of that. There are artists in the area that I hope would take a few hours a week to teach people. I follow a lot of local musicians and I think if they were to come in a teach people how to play certain instruments would be a plus. I’d love to have a few musical instruments on deck for underprivileged kids who can’t afford their own but still want to learn.These lessons would only happen a few days a week and on weekdays seeing as I hope the big events would happen during early evening and weekends. If this were to take off I can imagine it would be pretty crowded, but once everything comes into place it’ll be more settled.
        Now the “create” part is fairly easy. It’ just creating. An artists creates something they want to “share”. I’d love to have a space big enough where a few artists could rent space to call their own for a while as if it’s a mock studio so they can work on projects that they would eventually like displayed in the gallery.
        As far as running this, again, if possible I’d want Janyce to be my partner. We’d start off here in Dayton so that we can make the art community in Dayton bigger and better. For someone like me who is artistic the art community is extremely small here. I want to build something for kids who want to make art and feel like they have to go to a big city. I want to make it so if they aren’t able to go to a big city they still have a community to belong to.
         Living in Chicago also gave me ideas on certain events. I lived for outside concerts, Lollapalooza, and Just For Laughs. I’d love to be able to build this to where we can start to have events like this in Dayton. We could use some big music festival and some of our small venues could host after parties just like music venues do in Chicago during Lollapalooza. I’d also like to have a comedy festival like Just For Laughs. We have decent sized theaters that can house more popular comedians and the smaller clubs can be for up and comers (local and otherwise). I just want to be able to expand the art community and create revenue for my city.
        Hopefully to start off this gallery we could hire two people (manager/ asst. manager) to work under us so that they can handle things when we aren’t there. Since Janyce lives in Philly and I feel like, for me, Chicago is home, I’d love to take on those two first. Both places are rich in art and culture, but even so, I still haven’t seen a gallery that incorporates all what I want to achieve. We’d still be co-owners of all, but the Philly branch would be more her baby and the Chicago mine. If one or both of those do well I’d love to branch out even more, but mainly in smaller cities so that kids who love and create art can have a place where they feel like they belong and won’t feel like they have to escape to a big city right away to get that feeling.
        To go along with all of this there will of course be a website/blog that will promote the gallery, spotlight on certain artists, list events that are happening, intro to some of the artists works, and also an area for people around the country to leave feedback on their own towns so that we can get a feel on where other locations could be opened.
        With everything else who knows what else could come from this. Perhaps this could expand into making a production company, a museum, a concert venue, maybe even an art festival. I’m hoping this could become something massive.