Miami to Boston: Art, Commerce, & Care

A typically nonverbal woman finds the power of her voice. A man living with autism, who for years had trouble sitting still, is now able to focus on his work with calmness and purpose for hours at a time. A young artist sells her first work, earning not only income, but praise and admiration from her professional peers for the first time.

My colleague Anthony Marcellini shared these  stories when describing progressive studios like Gateway Arts during a Miami Art Week forum on the arts and mental health. The talk was sponsored by the JED Foundation.

What a contrast these anecdotes were to the art world’s latest “news” of a cryptocurrency entrepreneur paying more than $6 million for artist Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana.

Gateway Arts was grateful to join Anthony and the Detroit-based Progressive Art Studio Collective, along with 10 others at the first Open Invitational, which coincided with Miami Art Week and Art Basel Miami Beach.

It was no surprise that many attendees saw the exhibition of work by artists with intellectual, developmental, and psychiatric disabilities as a welcome respite from ABMB’s traditional focus on high-net-worth collectors and seven figure sales. The Open Invitational’s unique range of subject matter, styles, and technique was striking. Event organizer David Fierman told The Art Newspaper that he hopes to “create a much more human-centered, compassionate environment than a typical fair model and figure out how to break the barriers to create some momentum around this type of work”.

Mission accomplished.

Etta DeMartino, Main Studio Facilitator, selling artwork.

Bil Thibodeau, Artistic Director, and Greg Liakos, Director.

In a Washington Post essay last week, critic Philip Kenniccot reflected on art’s role in our turbulent, anxious post-election country.

“Art does many things, and is defined in many ways,” he wrote. “Art connects us to each other, to the world, to community. Art refines our senses, sharpens our thinking, trains us in perception. Art helps us see both passionately and clearly; it increases our capacity for empathy and care; it is a kind of moral reasoning; it elicits emotions and tames their destructive power; it draws us deeper into ourselves, helps us sort out the trivial and ephemeral from the essential and eternal; it both consoles us and sharpens our pain.”

The art created each week in our studios-and the relationships of care, respect, and personal growth that develop alongside that work – stand as powerful examples of art’s timeless, and immeasurable, values that Kenniccot so beautifully described.

So having decried the economics inevitably bound up with art in our capitalist society, I can happily describe what a humane art marketplace looks like: Gateway Arts’ 51st annual Holiday Fair.

Families of artists returning to the studios for the first time in months to view the breadth of creative work of their loved one. Brookline neighbors revisiting an annual December tradition, finding the familiar and the surprising. Art lovers from across Greater Boston digging deeply into the oeuvre of a newly discovered talent.

This is where the creative economy meets our ideals for social justice. This is the progressive art studio movement. This is Gateway Arts.