Providence Business News

Page 12
Dec. 24-30, 2007
www.pbn.com

Marketing, patience build gallery:
Bert Gallery makes appeals to art collectors outside Rhode Island too.

By Natalie Myers
MYERS@PBN.COM

COMPANY PROFILE

Bert Gallery
OWNER: Catherine Little Bert
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Art Gallery
LOCATION: 540 South Water St., Providence
EMPLOYEES: 2
YEAR ESTABLISHED: 1985
ANNUAL REVENUE: WND

As soon as visitors walk into Catherine Little Bert’s gallery on the East Side of Providence, they see her diverse taste. Though the first room is filled with historical artwork by Rhode Island artists, mostly from the mid 1800s through the late 1900s, large, bold canvases of contemporary art are seen peeking from the next room.

Sitting on a chaise lounge underneath gold-framed landscapes and still lifes, Bert said she’s sold hundreds of paintings by Rhode Island artists, both contemporary and historical, in the past 22 years. When she opened Bert Gallery downtown in 1985 at the Providence Biltmore, there wasn’t a large audience, particularly locally, interested in buying art. Some argue the same is true today.

But Bert learned at that time that I she wanted to build an audience she would need to concentrate on marketing her gallery and building a collector base outside the region. “Opening a gallery in a hotel also made me very cognizant that there are people who come to Providence from other places,” she said. “I was able to develop patrons or clients whose children have gone to Brown or were traveling for business and came into the city.”

About 60 percent of Bert’s business comes from art collectors living outside the state, particularly collectors interested in historic art, because many of those artists have a national reputation. “Historic is a little easier,” she said. “I would do advertising. I’d write and I’d research and try to come up with exhibitions I could get coverage on.”

Last year, for example, she wrote a lecture series about the historical difference in prices of artwork done by male versus female artists in the auction market. A portion of the series was published in Arts & Antiques magazine.

Bert has also changed with the times in utilizing the Internet and new technology. She has done so by advertising programming for her exhibits through e-mail blasts and blogs. She posts the e-mail blast content on a blog on the gallery’s Web site, www.bertgallery.com, for those who do not wish to receive the e-mails.

This year for the exhibit “What is original art? Is it a Giclee? She had a group of photographers, a digital printmaker and Pawtucket-based printmaker iolabs discuss in a public forum their views about Giclee, a process used to reproduce art. Bert recorded the forum and made it downloadable from her Web site for patrons who couldn’t attend.

In some ways, the programming is a marketing tactic for the gallery, because different subject matter appeals to different people, thus attracting a diverse audience into the gallery. “You have to develop a very large audience to support a gallery,” she added.

But not all of the people who come to the forums or stop by the gallery during Gallery Night Providence purchase art right away, she said. “They may come in and really like what they see, but then it might take them a long time to make a decision,” Bert said. “A lot of my sales are a year later.”

When asked how she comes up with ideas for exhibits such as the gallery’s current exhibit, “I could paint that,” which outlines the amount of art education, training, and experience it takes to become an artist, Bert said: “You have to be mindful of what’s going on in the market. I can’t tell you how many times people come in and say, ‘I could paint that.’”

Bert’s programming and historical research are two ways she creatively markets and builds an audience for the artwork she sells. “As creative as an artist is, you have to be creative in business in terms of listening to what people are saying to you, listening to what the artists are saying to you and to take and really translate that,” she said.

But Bert said she has to pay attention to financial realities as well. Sometimes she has to tell a contemporary artist whose work she likes that she can’t sell it, because she doesn’t have an audience for the work or the price points aren’t right. Having reasonable price points of $500 to $5,000 also contributes to the success of the gallery, she said. More than anything, though, the success of the gallery has depended on a reputation for being reliable. “The hardest part for galleries is being able to stay in business long enough…to build up that following,” she said.

Thankfully, Bert’s approach has yielded results. The gallery’s sales have grown five-fold since it opened and Bert has no reason to think sales with slow.