A few days ago I received an email from a client who bought one of my textile pieces, “After Great Pain” when it was exhibited in 1998 at the Japanese Gardens in Portland Oregon. The piece is large — 29″ high and 98″ wide. It had hung in the graduate school of the University of Oregon for about 12 years while my client worked there, but she recently retired and took the art with her. Alas, there’s no room for such a piece in her home. She wrote to ask me about selling it on what we call the “secondary art market.” [Here's the link to our southeastmain blog about the art].

A brief definition of the secondary art market can be found at the the McBride Gallery (Maryland) website:

Primary Market: Term for the sources of art works initially sold to collectors, usually through galleries, dealers, and at artist’s shows, the ‘first sale’ of a work of art.

Secondary Market: Term for sources of art works that have been sold before and are available again for sale in the market place. The secondary market provides liquidity for the art world. Estate sales and retirement down-sizing are the prime reason quality works of art appear on the secondary market. Auction houses, dealers, and galleries are participants in the secondary market. The secondary market often establishes the market value of works of art at a point in time.

Most artists, myself included, are clueless about the secondary art market. We are still just trying to sell our self-generated-and-owned work, honestly and forthrightly, to pay the rent. The secondary market for visual artists, unlike the financial arrangements for musicians, for example, does not provide any further financial advantage to the artist, unless there is a kind of rigged system involved (or you live in California, which is a matter for a different blog). If you are an artist superstar, high priced secondary sales of your work might boost your prices when you (or more likely your dealer) resells the work and you get the good PR. But for most of us, the secondary market is a moot point.

On the other hand, it would be nice to be able to help our collectors and clients out when their circumstances change. I would buy back “After Great Pain” if I had the money. I would trade some of my newer smaller pieces for the larger work if that was a possibility. I am asking around and getting various bits of advice from friends and colleagues, most of whom let out involuntary groans before they try to help.

Nevertheless, I am putting out the word to all my networks. If you have some place that could use a very long narrow piece of textile art, full of crows and ghosts of crows and stripped-pieced, discharged images of crows, let me know. It’s a piece that expresses that universal sense of grief, and is titled for the Emily Dickinson poem, the first line of which is “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” It also incorporates what were then sometimes new textile manipulation processes: discharge dying, reverse applique, strip piecing, raw-edged applique, and metallic thread. It is machine quilted and hand-finished. I think it’s one of my best pieces, both as craft and as art. –June