Gallery Beat

“Isla Balsera (Raft Island)” - Happy Birthday America, Wishing We Were There! Collage on Paper, Framed to 30x40 inches, c. 1976 Was in a private Collection in New Jersey - donated to American University Art Museum in 2015

Let’s Make a Deal…

One of the benefits of living in this amazing age of great technology and nanoseconds-fast communications is how easy it is for someone to find you in Al Gore’s Internet. With that easiness come all kinds of things associated with art, including how easy it is for a collector or their descendants to “find” you decades after they purchased one of your works of art.

To me, getting an email with an image and a description of how they got that piece of art – sometimes the story itself is worth the time travel backwards – is like finding an old friend that you created and now has returned… or is attempting to.

Sometimes the collector is interested in selling or deaccessioning the artwork – more often than not it is the children of the original buyer, who may have inherited the artwork after mom or dad passed away.

In any event, the issue is that they have several of your pieces and they want your help in selling them somewhere/somehow.

What to do? What not to do?

The second one is easy: never, ever take the artwork back to try to sell it for them – unless you’ve already got a “new” buyer lined up ahead of time who only wants your vintage work from 1979.

What to do?

In the nicest possible way thank the collector for supporting your career through the years, and make the following recommendations to him or her to do the following – I repeat – have THEM do it… not you:

Auction Houses - There are hundreds of auction houses in the United State alone which sell art - while most of them only deal with big name art only (Picasso, Matisse, Campello…), there are also many which accept most original artwork on consignment for their next auctions. All of them have an online submission process, where they generally want to know the basics of the work being offered (title, year, medium, size), the provenance, plus an image of the front and back.

I’d recommend to the person to formulate a strategy starting at the top of the auction world food chain (Sotheby’s, Christie’s, etc.) and then work way down. Nearly all the auction houses in the world are listed and available for proposed auction lots at www.invaluable.com and/or www.liveauctioneers. com - It’s generally free to do this submission review process, until the artwork sells - Make sure that your collector reviews all the associated costs, as most auction houses generally charge both the buyer and the seller a percentage of the final hammer price - in other words you do not pay anything UNLESS the work sells.

This is good both for the seller (your former collector), as he or she may get something (better than nothing) for the artwork… and for you (the artist), as it starts putting your name out in the secondary art market.

Expect really, really low prices at these auctions (unless you’re lucky enough to have to bidders in a bidding war with each other).

Option two is for your collector to work via an online art sale locations - sites such