BUILDING ELM82GALLERY PART ONE — BEFORE THERE WAS A GALLERY

Elm82gallery didn't start with a business plan.

It didn't even start with the idea of opening a gallery.

It started with me collecting art.

At the beginning, I was simply looking for work that I connected with. I wasn't thinking about building inventory, creating a website, shipping artwork, developing relationships with galleries, or any of the things that eventually became part of Elm82gallery.

I was buying because I liked the work.

But the more I collected, the more I started paying attention to why certain artists stayed with me and others didn't.

FINDING THE CONNECTION

I've always been drawn to street and urban art, but I realized pretty quickly that graffiti or street art alone wasn't what I was looking for.

It was the skill behind it.

I became interested in artists who were taking something familiar and pushing it somewhere else.

Technology. Photography. Painting. Drawing. Light. Color. Stencils. Typography. Architecture. The physical process of actually making something.

The technique could be completely different from one artist to another, but there had to be something behind the work.

I wanted to look at a piece and wonder how it was made.

That became important.

I didn't know it at the time, but that idea would eventually become one of the foundations of Elm82gallery.

LEARNING TO COLLECT

Collecting also started teaching me things I wasn't expecting.

There is a big difference between liking an artist and understanding their work.

I started researching editions. Artist's proofs. Printer's proofs. Hand-finished works. Different printmaking techniques. Earlier releases. Galleries. Provenance. Condition. Signatures. Certificates of authenticity.

I started looking at where a work came from instead of only looking at the image.

And I started learning the artists themselves.

Why did they make this?

Where did their style come from?

What are they doing differently?

What work actually represents them?

Those questions slowly changed the way I bought art.

I definitely didn't get every decision right. I still don't.

There were pieces I chased because I wanted them. Artists I became excited about and later realized didn't belong with the direction I was heading. There were times I bought too quickly.

But those decisions were part of figuring it out.

The collection started becoming more focused.

SOMETHING WAS TAKING SHAPE

Eventually I could put works from completely different artists next to each other and still see a connection.

That was when things became interesting.

It wasn't about having everything look the same.

Actually, I wanted the opposite.

I wanted artists with their own identity.

An artist working with technology and color could exist next to someone carving portraits into walls. Photography could sit beside graffiti. Detailed stencil work could exist beside something raw and aggressive.

Different processes.

Different backgrounds.

Different ways of seeing things.

But there was still a common thread.

Skill. Process. Identity. And artists pushing their work beyond where it started.

I didn't have a name for that yet.

THE IDEA BEFORE ELM82GALLERY

At some point, I started thinking differently about what I was building.

I wasn't interested in owning hundreds of random pieces from hundreds of artists.

I wanted the collection to say something.

And eventually another thought started creeping in:

Maybe this shouldn't remain only a private collection.

I didn't know exactly what that meant.

I didn't know how to build a gallery.

I didn't have experience running one.

I didn't have connections throughout the art world waiting for me.

What I had was the collection, an increasing amount of knowledge, and a belief that there were other people who might respond to these artists for some of the same reasons I did.

Someone might want one great print for their home.

Someone else might already understand editions, proofs, provenance and the importance of a particular work.

I wanted there to be room for both.

That was probably the earliest version of Elm82gallery.

Not a traditional gallery.

Not simply an online store.

And not my personal collection with a price tag attached to everything.

Something in between was beginning to take shape.

BEFORE I KNEW HOW TO BUILD IT

Looking at Elm82gallery now, it's easy to connect everything.

The artists. The collection. The website. The packaging. The photography. The relationships. The private collection. Even the way a piece will eventually arrive at someone's door.

None of that existed in the beginning.

There wasn't some master plan sitting on my desk.

A lot of it was figured out one decision at a time.

And there were plenty of moments when I had absolutely no idea what the next decision was supposed to be.

That's part of why I wanted to write this.

Not only to talk about the artwork and artists represented by Elm82gallery, but to document what actually went into building it.

The good decisions.

The mistakes.

The people I met.

The pieces I probably shouldn't have bought.

The pieces I'm incredibly grateful I did.

The financial side of trying to build something from nothing.

And the point where collecting art became something much bigger than I originally intended.

Because before Elm82gallery became a gallery, it was just an idea I hadn't completely figured out yet.

And really, that's where the story starts.

Elm82gallery