Dealer Collaboration

MAY DEALERS ACRE THINKING ABOUT THIS you leamed a number of things that strike me as rather profound from collio. hing with other galleries over the years. The final chapter of my book Havo. for ond Run a Commercial Art Gallery was tilled "Perage: The Ar Galer, dr 10 waily" and looked at gallery associations and other means that galleries have shing fores to help meet their goals. In that chapter. Idiscussed how wiling an of fin salement for the newly formed Williamsburg Gallery Association that we and ther Williamsburg galleries were trying to launch in 2002 kept running into snags.
In essence, the more involved we tried to make our mission statement, the more we diagreed about it. What we eventually concluded was that the association should imit its activities (and hence its mission) to the goals that we members had each previously identified as priorities for our individual businesses but realized we all Shared, like raising awareness of our programs, bringing more visitors and particularly collectors into our spaces, and supporting the arts in our community. We realized we should avoid adding any new goals that had not universally been part of our respective individual visions before, such as joint curatorial projects or a spectrum of political activities. There might be opportunities for such collaborations in the future, but they should not form the basis of our charter or be included in our mission state-ment. We had banded together primarily believing there was strength in numbers in alracting traffic, not because there was any need to rethink or reframe our programs.