Week 5 & 6

The last few weeks have been fairly busy. The week before my second third Friday opening was spent doing some prepatory things for the event. I put up some new paintings, redid a lot of the lighting outside the gallery, and cleaned up the walls. I'm impressed with how easy a lot of the things I do have become. Things such as hanging, lights, and wall repair were unfamiliar to me before this internship; now they are simple. This last week after we got all of the cleaning done, I got to have my first chance at advertising the gallery. A past intern, Jenny, showed me how to post an event on art websites. She sent me a big list of websites that have calendars, and also have places to do call for artists. The actual posting of the event was fairly easy; however, it is a time consuming task due to all the websites.
The third Friday finally rolled around and the weather was horrible. There was a huge storm, tornado wornings, and crazy wind. After taking 2.5 hours to get downtown, I did some last minute leveling of paintings and got ready for the night. Unfortunately, there were very few people that showed up for the event. Nevertheless, this gave me a chance to talk to some of the 4Art artists I didn't already know. I really enjoyed talking to the newest member that Robin just invited. I'm excited to see his work since he said he typically does realistic portraits.

Week 4

"This week has been one of my favorites. Two of the days I came this week I happened to catch the earlier train. This led to me showing up at the Zhou B center about 45 minutes earlier. After spending thus much time in the cafe, I got to know Anthony, the cafe worker and artist, very well. I've had a lot of conversations with him about job opportunities in both art and business. This is very helpful to hear about different jobs since I'm not exactly sure what I want to do yet.
During the majority of the week Robin and I worked to change the appearance of her gallery. Robin painted the outside walls, I filled all the holes along another outside wall, and I also did some touching up inside. After all this we rearranged and hung all the paintings that were along the outside wall. I have gotten very good at hanging which is a good skill to have. I'm surprised by how much my math skills have helped with the more complicated hanging arrangemts."

Week 3

"This week was a little more relaxed since we had the opening the week before. There wasn't much for me to do; however, I got to witness a few different things. The first one was the conversations between Robin and a woman inquiring about some web design. It was interesting to see how Robin negotiated with her and worked out prices. One thing Robin had to do was work within the budget of the woman since she was affiliated with Chicago Public Schools.
The other cool thing I witnessed was two women coming in and asking about renting the space. This was one thing that I didn't realize was done by gallery owners. Robin even told me that someone was going to have a wedding in her gallery in the next few months. I saw a lotof new things this week and had a lot of god conversations. I spoke with Derail quite a bit about his upcoming work and how he does his work. Each week this internship has allowed me to be exposed to more and more. I'm excited to see what happens next."