Artist Resource

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I designed, built, and promoted this non-profit, online art community in the late 1990s. At the time, I was a struggling fine artist and illustrator, showing my work in galleries, and volunteering on the boards of a couple of arts organizations. I was also a graphic designer, working for print publications and beginning to design online.  Artist Resource was one of the first online news magazines and forums for artists. At first, I focused on San Francisco, and published a variety of events, exhibits, classes, jobs, news, and other items of interest for artists, art students, writers, teachers, galleries and organizations. But in response to popular demand, Artist Resource grew beyond my wildest expectations. 

By 2001, we were serving 83,000 unique visitors every month. One million visitors per year. 

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Just a Simple Newsletter

I was an early member of AOL. My other choice would have been The Well. This project started as a simple mailing list of upcoming arts events, which I sent to other artists on AOL in 1996. I was surprised and gratified by the number of enthusiastic responses I received, as if they had only been waiting for an arts newsletter! Many of them submitted announcements for the next e-newsletter—exhibits, openings, and classes. Then I set up a regular publication schedule, and began to keep track of contributors and subscribers with a simple submission form that emailed the data to me. As word spread, my subscribers grew from 50 to 500. 

A Website for the Arts by Popular Demand

After a few months, new subscribers started asking where the website was. I had gathered information and advice for my newsletters that was too long for an email, unless serialized, but would be very useful on a website. After some research I discovered that it would be fairly easy to build the site in AolPress, an app like a very simple WordPress. So I started organizing the content from submissions and building pages. AolPress had a few formatting issues, so I also taught myself HTML. 

Growing the Art List Website

Eventually the AOL site grew to 77 pages! Many pages required active updates, such as Calls for Art & Competitions, Upcoming Art Exhibits & Events, Art Classes, Calls for Writing, Jobs for Artists, Jobs for Writers, Internship & Volunteer Positions, Studio & Live/Work Spaces, Materials & Tools Classifieds, Calls for Political Action and Petitions, News & Announcements, and Letters to the Editor. Articles, essays, and advice pages just needed to be reviewed every few months. They included How to Get an Agent, How to Find an Artist, Printing Your Art Work and Photos, Publicity & Promotion for Artists, Publishing Your Work Online, Arts Materials Safety Guide, Computer and Internet Safety Guide, as well as directories, such as Art Publications online and Galleries online. I designed an attractive counter for the landing page. Eventually, after the visitor numbers started getting really large, I moved it to the About section. (Today, I would use Google Analytics to get more precise traffic data.)

Managing emailed submissions was cumbersome, but I set up multiple submission forms, one for each category, that captured the required information, created an email and added the category subject line. Eventually submissions went directly to specific page moderators for review and posting. (Today, I would use dynamic forms with logic, and maybe an app like Zapier.) The site was already outgrowing AOL's capabilities, and artists and writers who were not AOL members also wanted to contribute. In order to expand, we needed to move to a private host with robust tools.

Planning an Online Community

I purchased the Artist Resource domain through Network Solutions, one of the first domain name registries authorized by ICANN, and then confirmed that Artist Resource was actually listed in WhoIs. I researched hosting services and set up an account with Best, located in San Francisco (later they became Verio, Inc). Best offered FTP uploads to my directory, with add-on modules, such as listserv and form-building applications.

I had created a site map of the essential pages (see map below), which guided me in creating the directory structure on the new host server. Then I started building pages again, this time using templates, with tables to organize the text and images. Every page was hand-coded. Tables took page layout to another level.  I was able to add global navigation in pull-down menus in a table division, and secondary navigation in a table column. After Artist Resource went live, I asked my mailing list to beta-test it, and invited volunteers to help me update content. Soon I had a volunteer staff of six artists, makers, and emerging web designers. 

Grass-roots Promotion and Outreach

I invited our contributors and subscribers to become members, and created an Artist Resource Member badge for them to display on their websites and printed promotional materials. I also built reciprocal interest by offering to exchange partner membership badges with every arts organization, gallery, and resource I could reach. We listed their events and services in exchange for listing Artist Resource on their site. We heavily promoted the huge San Francisco Open Studios, as well as East Bay Open Studios, and Emeryville's ArtWalk, and listed all of our member artists who participated. 

I also introduced an annual juried exhibition of our own member artist portfolios online. The prize was a Featured Artist page with a set of secondary portfolio pages, built and hosted by Artist Resource. The winners received a gold, silver, or bronze award badge for their own web pages. The submitters were enthusiastic, since Artist Resource already had high visitor traffic. 

More Popular Demand

In response to hundreds of submissions and queries, we expanded our content to include the San Francisco Bay Area and surrounding communities, including  San Jose, South San Francisco, Berkeley, Emeryville, Oakland, the rest of the East Bay, plus Marin, Sonoma, and Napa, up to Santa Rosa. We had interest as far north as Mendocino, and as far south as Santa Cruz. Clearly there was a huge need for an arts information clearinghouse.

The membership doubled every month at first, then every week!

Adding Forums

By 1998, we fielded dozens of queries each week, about where to show your work, how to get an agent or gallery, what to charge for original work, how much commission to pay galleries, how to get cards printed, where to teach crafts classes, best sources for supplies and materials, and more. 

So we added forums, using off-the-shelf software that was re-purposed by our wonderful web designers, who also trained me in editing the code. These forums allowed our members to answer each other, and freed up our staff for other tasks. Of course, some of the forums quickly blew up into dozens of pages and also needed to be moderated weekly. 

We attracted very few trolls in the early days, but after a few inappropriate submission and emails, we realized that we needed a gatekeeping system to let members create a user name and password to login. Our host offered a simple solution, and we learned how to set up permissions, and moderate that system as well. A login was only required to post information, not to view our listings. 

Media Notice

We were mentioned multiple times in the local press (thank you, Laura Lengyel), as well as in American Artist and in The Wall Street Journal as a artist community and a valuable arts resource for artists and art educators. We started receiving emails from artists in other cities who wanted an Artist Resource in Seattle, Cincinnati, or Miami. Two different members wrote that they moved to Bay Area because Artist Resource convinced them that they would be joining a thriving arts community.

Artist Resource had become a fantastic experiment in community-building. Wonderful, talented people had volunteered to build and manage an online arts community for our members, whose ideas, enthusiasm, and questions kept us motivated and moving.

Burning the Candle

Our volunteer staff, now increased to 20, moderated the forums, updated pages, and answered incoming emails. Our turnover was surprisingly low, but we always had a trickle of volunteers leaving and new ones coming on board. They all had day jobs, or were looking for work, or trying to get art careers off the ground. I was also working three other jobs— full-time Chair of the Print Design Program at the Center for Electronic Art, teaching at San Francisco State, and part-time art director at Film/Tape World. 

We really needed to avoid burnout. The sheer scale of the updates demanded some sort of automation. We desperately needed funding for a database-driven content management tool to serve our rapidly increasing content to an eager and growing audience. But before I could apply for a grant for technical support, Artist Resource needed to have non-profit status. 

Becoming a Non-Profit

I contacted ArtHouse, one of our partner organizations, for advice. They set up a meeting with the director of California Lawyers for the Arts and I made a proposal. They couldn't fund us, but offered to let us operate under their umbrella as a 501(c)(3) non-profit. That allowed me to ask for donations and grants.

I gathered a small board of directors who were creative business owners and familiar with start-up challenges. Thereafter, I wrote many grant applications with their assistance, specifically to fund the construction of an SQL database to manage our web content. I set up a business bank account for Artist Resource at Wells Fargo. We were philosophically opposed to requiring membership fees which would create a pay-wall for struggling artists and writers, but we did ask for donations on the web site.  

By 2001, we were serving 83,000 visitors every month—yes, unique visitors—artists, designers, writers, students, teachers, patrons, galleries, and organizations. One million visitors per year. 

Hat in Hand

I continued to reach out to arts organizations and agencies that supported artists. For those that supported artists, but not art organizations, I pitched Artist Resource as an art project. Unfortunately, federal and local funding for the arts had been drastically cut by a conservative administration, and the dot-com bubble was getting wobbly. I received friendly but noncommittal responses from arts organizations who were wondering whether they would have to survive on donations alone. They doubted the value of providing seed money to an online arts community in that climate.

The Bubble Burst

In 2000, the dot-com bubble finally burst. By 2001, nobody wanted to fund an internet-based start-up, especially in the arts. But it was difficult to provide fresh content and manage daily updates without financial support to fund an upgrade in programming. Today, I would try crowd-sourcing, but at the time we just appealed to our members, many of whom were also struggling. 

We were not able to recruit, train, and manage enough volunteers to manually update the hundreds of upcoming events, classes, and opportunities in the Bay Area and nearby counties, and also moderate dozens of forums and classifieds sections. We received some small but heartfelt donations, but they could not cover an expansion. We began talking about cutting pages or entire categories as a short-term solution, and put our hopes for a programming solution on hold.

Life Changes

At that time, I was suffering from mysterious neurological issues, chronic fatigue, and cluster headaches. (These were the first obvious symptoms of MS, but I was not diagnosed for six more years. Read more in Another Summer.) 

After United States was attacked on September 11, 2001, the country was in turmoil, and getting approval for funding became impossible. I was devastated by the attack, horrified by the war, exhausted by working four jobs, and anxious about my health and the future of the arts in this country. That December, my husband moved to New York to care for his mother during a serious and eventually terminal illness. 

As a result of the dot-com crash, funding also dried up for the Center for Electronic Art—where I chaired the Print Design Program. When enrollment in digital design classes suddenly dropped, we faced financial ruin. Because CEA was another creative project I deeply believed in, I joined the senior staff in taking a 50% pay-cut for a year, and made Herculean efforts to keep CEA going. We hired a managing director who promised to get us back on track, but he secretly stopped paying our health insurance premiums and Social Security, and started purging senior staff who protested. I sought legal advice, tried mediation, and finally resigned in protest. 

In 2003, I joined my husband in New York. I continued to manage Artist Resource remotely with the help of dedicated staff. We lost a few key people, and tried to pick up the slack. We kept going because we believed in the mission of Artist Resource, to help creative people succeed by giving them critical information, advice, and tools, and we were still buoyed up by positive emails from our members. 

Over the next two years, I continued to be plagued by increasingly disabling symptoms, and reluctantly realized that I couldn't continue to put in the time that Artist Resource needed and our staff deserved. 

I conveyed my profound gratitude and wrenching regrets to our staff, and wrote letters of recommendation. I alerted our thousands of members to our impending closure, with appreciation for their support. We closed the forums, but left the information and advice pages up for another year, to continue directing our visitors to the many arts resources that had grown up after us.  

Eventually, with a heavy heart, I took down the Artist Resource website. 

Our URL—artistresource.org—now belongs to scammers. Please don't go there. 

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Many, Many, Many, Many Thanks

I am especially grateful to our Staff Technical Counselor Ziya Aktas who helped with many programming challenges, our Forms, Database, and Search Engine Manager, Chris Carillo, and Publication Managers Torrey Nommesen, Anne Ross, Kim Munson, Ari Grossman-Naples, and Molly Hilliard who carried on as I got sicker. Over the years, our Publication Managers and Forum Moderaters included Renee Bareno, Amy Bond, Donna Brown, Lynn Brown, Darlyn Calavitta, Marie Grace Calinisan, Tom R. Chambers, Rebecca Clark, Coco and Gil Corral, Valerie Corwin, Beverly Dittberner, Kevin Dunn, Leonard Gonzalez, Linda Goodman, Suzanne Kendall, Kate Laux, Suzan Leon, Vicky Martinez, Vicki McDermott, Sunny McKee, Dianna Myers, Mark Allen Nakamura, Aki Sasaki, Elizabeth Slocum, Yarrow Summers, Lee Wang, Diane Wren, and Scott Young. Member Portfolio Managers included John Merlo (Bay Area), Chris Potter (US), and Reverend Sean Carberry (Wordwide). Darrell Knigge handled online publicity. I am forever grateful to our board members, Joy-Lily, Jane Lewis, Chris Pagels, and Johnny Davis.  If I have forgotten anyone, it is unintentional, so please let me know.

The Artist Resource staff moved on to careers in web design, programming, publishing, the arts, journalism, and non-profits. I warmly wish them, and our many thousands of creative contributing members, very well. 

Li Gardiner

formerly, Founder and Executive Director, Artist Resource

2000-2001 — Art Space World Wide Web Award

Congratulations! Your site meets the qualifications that makes for a great site. We enjoyed our visit.

2000 — Critical Mass Award

Very nice site, excellent  design, clever original graphics, great artwork, and your content is informative, entertaining, presented well and  easy to access. A worthy enterprise and a positive contribution to the Web. . .

2000 — ArtQuest Diamond Award

Many sites have been reviewed but very few are awarded diamonds. . .

—Kathy Kahre, ArtQuest, Inc.

November, 2000 — Giant Tomato Award

This award is given each week to a handful of the very best sites which meet a strict criteria. Winning sites boast useful, interesting and entertaining content; fast page loading and no broken links. 

—John Rowland, editor

1999 — Starting Point Site of the Day

By popular vote.

1998 and 1999 — Awesome Universal WebSite Top 500