Guidelines for Gallery Exhibitions at the Spirit Room

Normally, a potential exhibitor is recommended to the Spirit Room Galleries by someone in the local arts community, most often someone in visual arts academia.  It is rare that an acclaimed artist would contact us directly.  Sometimes, a gallery will contact the Spirit Room recommending an artist that they have shown recently.  In some cases, we have exhibits traveling through the North Dakota Association of Art Galleries.  In other cases, a grant application is written to bring the works of a well-known artist to the gallery such as the Bremer Foundation underwriting Bright Bird: the art of Sister Corita Kent.  Another type of exhibit tied to grant funding was Carving a New Life: Izudin Becic, from the Bosnian wood carving tradition, an exhibit underwritten by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Exhibitors are asked to submit visual images electronically or in some cases they will ask to bring examples of their work into the Spirit Room offices.  An interview is conducted and the curator makes a decision about whether an exhibit will be offered to the artist.

Several factors come into play because artists come from various backgrounds. Generally speaking, we like to have recently completed works using the guideline of work produced within the last three years.

Because the Spirit Room has two galleries, larger work and more prolific artists exhibit in the larger gallery space.  The smaller gallery is especially good for young artists who may not have a large body of work or artists that would have difficulty with the costs of framing.

The work is scheduled, at times, as far out as six months to a year ahead of time.  That means that the artists usually must plan ahead to both have the work completed and be available at the time of the exhibition.

Biographies, artist’s statements and visual images are required to be submitted a month before the opening of the exhibit so that the press can become involved in the promotion of the exhibit.

25 September 2007