Art Problems

What makes an art fair successful? Sales. Crowds. Fairs that give people a reason to come back. This fall, artist William Powhida, Netvvrk Director of Operations Penny Retica, and I walked New York's fair week to see which ones do that job. We went to the Spring Break in the old CBS News offices, Independent 20th Century, The Armory, and Printed Matter's New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1. One of them left us with some serious FOMO.  Guest credits Artist William Powhida Netvvrk Director of Operations, Penny Retica Additional Reading Valentina Di Liscia, "Independent 20th Century, the Mise en Abyme of Art Fairs," Hyperallergic, 2026 Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, Verso, 2024 Free class If you want shows beyond your home city, join my free class, How to Get Shows Beyond Your Region, on October 14 at 7 PM EDT. Register at courses.netvvrk.com/growth

Mike Ryczek flew to New Orleans to see his work hanging in the kind of gallery he'd always aspired to. Dinner with the other artists went fine. Then came the gallery crawl the next day, and he froze: four galleries deep without talking to anyone, thirty minutes standing beside his own paintings waiting for someone to approach, and finally the Irish goodbye and some consolation fried chicken.  In this episode, the two of us talk about the moments an art career makes you feel like an imposter, and I share my own recent version of his story, because these feelings don't retire with experience. What changes is how you recover. Mike is a painter in Dedham, Massachusetts who has held gallery representation for over a decade, won a $15,000 Mass Cultural Council grant, and still interrogates every achievement for the trick behind it. Our conversation stays close to what an art career feels like: from the whiplash of rejection and reward arriving back to back to the self-belief it takes to keep assigning yourself work few people see. There’s no strategy in this episode, just the facts of the profession.  Relevant Links:  Mike Ryczek Creative Capital Mass Cultural Council

Have you ever struggled to figure out exactly where your art fits? Or maybe you’ve tried to write an artist statement only to find it one of the hardest tasks you’ve ever had to do. Today’s guest, Jennifer Sharpe, a multimedia artist and experimental filmmaker, has a way of making those problems vivid and infinitely relatable.  In this episode, we talk about how a continuously shifting cultural landscape affects artistic practice. Over the last twenty years, we’ve seen multiple online communities collapse and rebuild. Jennifer came away convinced that while platforms vanish and institutions wobble, the relationships you build are the only durable asset an artist has.  This conversation wanders in the best way. Racehorses, vagabonds, cave paintings, jobs, and a whole bunch of other ideas you wouldn’t think have anything to do with artists, but really do. RELATED LINKS Free Info Session, How to Get on a Museum’s Radar, Tuesday, July 21, 7:00 PM EST Jennifer Sharpe

The art world tells artists that if you just keep going, eventually something will break for you. But persistence can also keep you stuck. If you don’t know something’s broken so you keep doing the same thing, you won’t grow. That's what happened to Gin Stone. Gin is a Cape Cod artist who did what she was supposed to do. She kept going. And she stayed stuck because she didn't have the right help. In this episode, she talks about the gallery show that made her realize she had nothing to say about her own work, the overhaul that followed, and the grant she landed just last week for a sonification project built on 2,000 years of geological data.   RELEVANT LINKS: Free Info Session, How to Get on a Museum’s Radar, Tuesday July 21, 7:00 PM EST Gin Stone

After years of producing social practice art, Peter Walsh wanted to get back in the studio. So he rented a space and started painting. But when he started reaching out to his old painting friends, he found most had moved on to other things. He needed community.  He joined Netvvrk, along with many of the artists in his Brooklyn studio building. Then he practiced patience: he went to other people’s shows, built relationships, and let the work lead. That led to his first solo show in New York.  In this episode, we talk about restarting a practice mid-career, the self-doubt that shows up even with a long CV, and why the artwork always has to come first. Peter lost a painting the day before we recorded. He painted over it and kept working. As he puts it, he's not done. RELEVANT LINKS Free Info Session, How to Get on a Museum’s Radar, Tuesday July 21, 7:00 PM EST Peter Walsh