The art world has failed.

It has fallen wildly short of making itself relevant and accessible.

I have loved art since I was a young child, but did not really feel comfortable or at ease in art spaces until probably five years ago. How does someone who loves and seeks out the arts remain on-edge and full of trepidation when engaging with it? What does that mean for the rest of the population who does not already have that love of art?

What I have learned is we have some firmly planted myths and misconceptions about art that we need to break open.

How we got here.

Let me take you through why I felt this discomfort and how I got to where I am today—teaching people to fall in love in art and become art collectors early in life, and in unexpected ways.

I went to an arts middle school where as an eleven year old I had a teacher tell me I wasn’t good at drawing and shouldn’t take art. Fortunately I have a wonderful father who basically said to her absolutely not, that’s literally your job… to teach art, so I was allowed to stay enrolled in the class but it immediately made art feel scary and like a discipline that required intense study and schooling. As a pre-teen.

In high school I didn’t take an art class for the first three and a half years and when I finally summoned the courage I fell in love with it, but then in college I didn’t take a single art class—history or otherwise. There was no way I was going to sit in a class with a professor and a bunch of art majors and discuss art. But I loved art. I understood that it created a sanctuary for me and I sought out that feeling in as many community arts events as I could, ones that didn’t feel intimidating or exclusionary.

I went on to found a nonprofit arts organization after graduating and involved myself in the arts in numerous ways, notably all of them outside of academia or any art institution. I literally had to start my own nonprofit to create a structure that felt accessible enough.

Even then I hugely struggled to really get art until I taught myself the methods and practices I teach and use with my clients today. I would freeze up when talking about visual art and relied on a very good question deflection technique to avoid engaging. This was obviously a problem so I set out to understand my fears around it, learn the story of art in my life, and create practices that let me release the pressure to sound sophisticated, educated and intellectual.

I found the more personal I could get with it, the closer it came to my actual life, the more I could draw out connections to our larger society—that I actually became more culturally savvy, interesting and authentic.

I say all of that to point out how intimidating, exclusive, and inaccessible the art world is. And this coming from someone who love, loves art.

When I was running this nonprofit I used to host and organize dozens of events every year, across all disciplines—visual art, literary, dance, theater, film, storytelling… the spectrum. I noticed that despite that range of mediums, I could almost guarantee I knew exactly who was going to be in the audience.

It was the same, over and over again.

I started to think about the reasons why, because as the Executive Director of an organization whose mission is to support artists, the audience is a critical component. The audience makes the art impactful. The audience is who carries the messaging and experience of the art out into the world. A large audience of people engaging with the arts in a way they never had before seemed critical.

In researching and asking questions of colleagues in the field as well as attendees, friends, strangers, the internet, I learned that a lot of people avoid, literally avoid, the arts. The reasons are many and in my opinion they are all tragic, and point to a failed art world.

The arts make us human.

If people do not feel comfortable with art or in art spaces then art is not doing what it has the potential to do.

So I thought what better place to address this widespread issue than in the home. In the place people feel most at ease.

That is how I started this work of subverting the art world and helping people become empowered art collectors.

I stepped down as executive director from the nonprofit in 2019 in order to fully focus on supporting people as they build an authentic relationship with art, reaching folks who have found the arts to be exclusive and inaccessible in order to equip them with the skills and practices they need to use art as a resource in their lives.

By facilitating a movement of new art collectors who are determined to do it differently my aim is to invigorate our culture to center the arts more—societally and individually. By supporting people as they become powerful art collectors who offer meaningful support to emerging and mid-career artists, this company is able to nourish the arts in a foundational way, and begin to redress the failings of the art world.