Last year, female artists from the Boulder area joined forces to create an all-women art and maker collective. The New Local began as a pop-up shop on the Pearl Street Mall during the 2019 holiday season and has since been established as a nonprofit group. The organization is dedicated to encouraging consumers to shop locally and creating a new business model that is more lucrative for female artists.
As it has in many other aspects of life, COVID-19 has radically altered the landscape of the art industry. As in-person art events have effectively been canceled due to the pandemic, it has become much more challenging for artists to sell to their customers.
Amid the coronavirus chaos, The New Local developed a method to continue supporting the members’ mission virtually by creating an online platform. In an effort to connect holiday shoppers with local creators, the group launched its virtual artisan market Nov. 27.
“A lot of these women who are on The New Local site depend on art festivals, art shows, pop-ups; so basically the market dropped out from under all of us. We needed to create our own market for the holidays,” said Executive Director Marie-Juliette Bird.
Founders of The New Local compiled work from some of the best female artists across Colorado and designed their platform so the artists could retain 100% of earned sales revenue, breaking the status quo for the market structure for women in the creative industries.
“Nobody is taking a cut off of these women artists,” Bird said.
Edie Ure is a contributing artist with The New Local who makes botanically dyed pillows. Ure said having an online medium to reach consumers is crucial for artists at this time.
“It’s really important to our businesses to be able to have a platform like this that enables us to sell directly to the consumer, rather than having to sell wholesale at a cheaper price through a store,” said Ure. “Direct-to-consumer is a much better model for us.”
Ure also said the collaboration the platform facilitates is beneficial to the artists because it helps them support each other.
“As women, we have a strong voice collectively. Grouping us together … we’re stronger than individually,” she said.
Bird said she hopes this platform will also serve as a way to serve the Boulder community as a whole.
“When you are buying something from this site, you are supporting a woman in your community. It might be your neighbor, or your sister or your daughter. … It’s really building your own community,” she said.
Shoppers can access The New Local’s catalog at thenew-local.org until Dec. 31.
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December 14, 2020 at 02:02AM
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The New Local develops an online platform to support female artists - Boulder Daily Camera
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