For the past couple of days, I’ve been streamlining and tweaking a couple of pages on my site—my news page and the new Mentoring page. I’m trying to get that mentoring page right, but it’s not quite there yet.
I’m pretty sure I need to change the name of it, since I’m realizing now that I fall somewhere between the cracks of mentor, coach, teacher, and/or advisor. But which am I? Well, I’m trying to figure that out. I don’t really like any of those titles. Guide, maybe?
I’m also not starting this as an official business yet. Right now, I will do free 20-minute consultations, and I’ve already planned out a free online workshop to see if I can start helping those who may want to work with me in the future. This will occur on Saturday, September 12th, but it is limited to 15 spots for now. If it goes well, I will for sure do more of these. I did a similar one IRL a little over a year ago during my solo show at Compound in Yucca Valley, and it went very well.
Now, promoting both the workshop and the mentoring thing is going to be a major bear. I was once really great at promotion. I need to get good at it again if I want to help teach others how to do it for themselves.
I feel like, once ello went belly-up, I missed out on procuring a better Instagram following. I didn’t spend any real time trying to get followers or “likes” there because I never much liked it. Once I had many thousands of followers on ello, I left Facebook, and after ello dropped out, going back to Instagram was daunting and depressing. So, I took a long break from Insta to find my bearings.
Four months later, easing back into Instagram, my follower count dropped, and I went from getting an average of 80 likes to no more than 20, which of course is not much in the big scheme of things. I rarely get 80 now. I also think that Instagram is kind of evil in general. Not because it’s hard to get followers and likes (it is!), but because of what it does to us as artists and people in general. For me, I couldn’t help but compare myself to other artists: how often they were cranking out artwork, how many followers and likes they were getting, and how “famous” (Instagram famous) they seemingly were. It seems a lot of people on there are living the high life, are super successful, or influencers with a million followers.
I have theories about the numbers on one’s Instagram account, Facebook, YouTube, and mailing lists. But who will listen? The fact of the matter is, it’s not the quantity; it’s the quality. You can have 5 people who follow you while someone else has 100K. Those 5 people might be your most loyal collectors, and maybe that’s all you really need to be successful. You can have 100K artists who follow you, but what does that really equate to?
For a while, I really tried not to care about social media. I told myself it wasn’t important, but now I see its importance if you’re trying to promote yourself as a business. It seems more important than promoting yourself as “just” an artist. The thing is, I was never trying to sell my art on Instagram, or anywhere else online really since the early 2000s. That’s a long fucking time ago! But 2005 is when I started working with galleries, so online sales were done very carefully, and rarely. I was a bit more artist grant-focused then, and I even got a few.
I was also extremely fortunate to work with Vamp & Tramp for over 20 years. Their site is now gone. They closed last summer, forever. I was really hoping they’d keep their site up as an archive, but it eventually went missing. It was the largest site of its kind with over 300 book artists and fine presses. I was lucky to be a part of that for decades thanks to Judith Hoffberg, my book arts mentor for some years before she died. She was one of the most encouraging people in my life. It was extremely sad when she had me write (through her dictation) her last editorial for her newsletter, Umbrella. She knew she was going to get weaker and weaker from leukemia. She died about a year after that, just about 6 months before my mother passed.
Judith was a true mom to me. She and my real mom were the same age—Judy about a year older. Though she was born in 1934, she came from the East Coast, which indicates that her parents were already here during the war. However, she had a numbered tattoo on her forearm. I once asked her about that, but she immediately deflected and told me it was “nothing.” There were many people who got commemorative number tattoos in memory of a family member they lost (cousins, aunts, uncles, etc.), and this was a private practice. I’ll probably never know exactly why she had that tattoo, but I have to assume it was for that purpose.
In any case, Vamp & Tramp were a huge help to me. Judith helped get my first real artist’s book into the Jaffe Collection at Florida Atlantic University, and shortly thereafter hooked me up with V&P. From there, I somehow got that same artwork into the Getty’s Research Library on my own. And this is what I mean about being an avid self-promoter. All I did was contact the Getty’s Special Collections librarian to meet with me, and a week later, I sold them one. And that got me a couple of featured stories in the paper. Oh, yeah, maybe I contacted one of those newspapers myself. Ha ha!
All this to say, I need to modernize the way I promote myself now. Perhaps I’m too old to master Instagram, or maybe I just need to learn it. One thing I haven’t really done is create reels. Reels sorta took over on Insta a few years back, and I never really tried. I do not like videoing myself, which is also why I have never gone the YouTube route either. I think I might change that. …That probably should have been a question mark, not a period. I also need to take a few “coaching/mentoring” courses, which I’ve started to do.
Okay, so, in other news, or on the school front, that history teacher who was giving me such a hard time gave us all our final grades. I was pretty blown away to discover I got an A! The final paper counted toward most of the grade, so that A pushed my final grade up to 100%, or however many points make an A. Yay for me! I’m so glad that class is behind me. Next up are Sociology 1, Art History (Renaissance to Contemporary), and beginning ASL. That’s nearly a full-time schedule (ASL is a whopping 5 units), so it’s going to be intense!