We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sophocles Plokamakis. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sophocles below.
Sophocles, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?
My mission since I first started teaching Manga, Anime, Comics, Drawing, Photoshop and Yu-Gi-Oh! at the After 3 at NEST+M (a gifted and talented school in the Lower East Side) was to create a Neo Art Renaissance on Earth. After graduating from the School of Visual Arts with a BFA in cartooning, I was convinced I would never step foot in another school ever again. When I was offered a position to teach the subjects I am passionate about at NEST+M, I fell in love with teaching immediately after starting. This was my opportunity to give back all my knowledge in my chosen field to elementary school kids who were just as passionate about Art, Manga and Animation but didn’t know as much as I did because I had been obsessed with cartoons and art ever since I was even younger than they were. My parents blessed me by nurturing my interest in drawing and art by putting me in art classes ever since I was young and taking me to museums on every family trip we went to, in the U.S. as well as abroad. When I asked my mother as an adult when I started drawing she said I was 2 years old, and from then I never stopped. Since then I have taught at many after school programs in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, currently I teach drawing and comic art at Gym-Azing in my local hometown of Astoria, Queens, NY.
It wasn’t until 2018, when I curated my first gallery art show at One Art Space gallery in TriBeCa, NYC that my goal to create a Neo Renaissance took on a life of it’s own. I have had the pleasure of curating 30 art shows (including a few of my own solo shows) and it was at One Art Space where I met my beloved wife Thais in the first show I curated there (Septemberfest). She was one of the featured artists in the show who travelled all the way from Brazil to feature her beautiful paintings in the exhibition. Meeting her changed the course of my entire life and NYC art history, as we got married a year later, and formed our company, Start Shows.
Start Shows has helped bring about a Neo Renaissance by giving emerging artists the opportunity to showcase and sell their artwork in NYC Galleries, with One Art Space, a Gorgeous and Giant gallery, being the main platform for the shows. For many of these artists, the first Start Show they feature their art in, is their first ever gallery show, and for some their first art show of their lives. This fact inspires and motivates Thais and I to work harder and always innovate and offer new opportunities to artists, like helping them get published in press in magazines, blogs, websites and interviews. We also promote the artists art heavily on our social media with Instagram being our main platform for Start Shows. We are proud to have assisted hundreds of artists to exhibit and sell their art in NYC galleries as when I first tried to get my own art in galleries in Chelsea, Manhattan, NYC I was turned away from the galleries with one gallerist even telling me, we don’t look at art, try the lower east side. I didn’t appreciate the attitude, so I decided to take matters into my own hands and curate large group shows to give artists and myself the opportunity to exhibit, sell and be seen and celebrated by the New York public. It’s truly been a dream come true that I am able to have a business with my wife that reflects my passions, and to be able to Exhibit my own comic art at One Art Space where the legendary comic artist Jack Kirby (co creator of marvel comics characters with Stan Lee) has exhibited his art work, alongside a plethora of other talented artists is something I would never have imagined doing while I was depressed in Senior Year of SVA because I didn’t know what the future held for me or if I could make it in the art world. I lacked faith in my abilities back then, but now I believe strongly in my mission of nurturing the Neo Art Renaissance, by continuing to give opportunities to artists from around the globe.
I give many thanks to God for blessing me with the opportunities and gifts that I have been bestowed with. To be a creator and help others create is the ultimate blessing for me!
Sophocles, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I first got started curating art exhibitions as the Vice President of a group called the Greek Artists Guild in Astoria, Queens, NY in 2012. We were a group of Greek visual artists who made art in mixed mediums, that got together periodically at the Stathakion Cultural Center in Astoria. I helped curate 6 art exhibitions with the Greek Artists Guild over a period of a few years, before I decided that I wanted to focus on teaching and making my own illustration and comic art.
Several years later I started exhibiting in many art shows around NYC in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx and it gave me a craving after exhibiting at least once a month (sometimes more) to start to curate art shows again. I curated another 2 shows at the Stathakion Cultural center with a couple of friends of mine, but the goal was to create an official real gallery experience for the artists in the shows that I wanted to curate and for my art. The shows at the Stathakion had been tabled art shows as we weren’t allowed to damage the wall with nails or screws, which meant that artists with paintings, and framed art couldn’t exhibit it on the walls and the center had their own decor.
By chance I happened to visit the Jack Kirby Art Exhibition at One Art Space in May of 2018, and luckily in the last 30 minutes of the days showing, I met the then gallery curator Diego. I told him I loved the space and it was beautiful, just what I was looking for and I was shocked when he said, you can curate your next show here! This was much different treatment then I received in Chelsea. After that first show (Septemberfest) I realized there seemed to be a need for what I envisioned and I was doing, as the reception and reaction from artists was stellar.
As a company, my wife Thais and I solve problems for artists around the world by offering the service to exhibit Art on the walls, tables and digital screens built for NFT art in NYC galleries, as well as teaching and nurturing the featured artists in the shows about marketing their art, preparation for the show, selling art and proper presentation of artwork. On top of that, the artists are added to an Instagram group chat before the show that stays open permanently so they can network leading up to the show and they are exposed to the art community come show time when they all get to finally meet each other in person, as well as art enthusiasts and art collectors. Once artists have worked with us in a show, we will repost art related stories to our Instagram stories, even after the show is over. This way they continue to receive support from us.
We also offer one on one coaching to help artists excel in their careers and being that Thais and I are both art teachers we have the ability to help them with the craft of their art as well! What I think sets us apart from others is that we pour our heart and soul into the shows, help the artists market their art on social media, and we do IG lives to inspire and teach the artists about the art world and gallery shows, from experience of having curated so many shows first hand.
We are most proud of the fact that we have built a community of artists and art lovers in NYC. We consider our clients as our friends, and represent them to the best of our abilities. Most recently starting in 2022 we even have had several dinners with some of the artists from the shows where we shared stories, laughed, and even made collaboration art together!
This January 20,21,22 we will be blessed to be able to curate the 16th show at One Art Space since 2018, called New You Art Exhibition featuring 37 talented artists in multiple mediums including, painting, drawing, photography, NFT art, sculpture, prints and art merch. The show is Free admission and open to the public.
Have you ever had to pivot?
When the pandemic first hit, no one knew what to expect or how long it would last. We had a show planned for the early months of the pandemic called New York Stories 2. I was hoping that it wasn’t as serious as the news was making it out to be but soon realized that that the pandemic was pretty terrible. For many months after we were unable to host events and without our primary source of income.
Thais and I pivoted by using that off time to create our own artwork, but also we created art contests on our @startshows page that were free to enter that had one National (U.S.) winner and one international winner. They were well received and had a lot of engagement and helped us continue to feel connected with our community. We also had IG lives during quarantine where we shared art tips while we were creating art, Thais painting with acrylics and I was drawing and coloring comic pages of my comic book FarmBoy.
For more than 10 years before the pandemic I was focused on my Metro Manga project (Subway Comic art) where I would draw cartoon versions of the people I would see that inspired me in the Subways of the world mostly the NYC Subway but also in Japan, Brazil, London and other states in the U.S. and I have collected over a thousand drawings from this project.
After the pandemic I decided to step back and take a sabbatical from Metro Manga until Covid died down, so I didn’t draw in the subway for over a year. At first this was very painful to me as an artist because I love drawing from life and the people and characters in my comic art were the people of the NYC and worldly subways.
However, this gave me so much free time, that I decided to revisit my college comic book project Farm Boy which to this day I have exhibited many of the originals in NYC galleries like One Art Space. It was all the shows at One Art Space gallery full of vibrant and rich colorful art that inspired me to take the black and white manga I made at the School of Visual Arts and re create and write it in full color with traditional tools like Copic markers and color pencils. The third chapter will be created with acrylics and posca acrylic markers.
Now I am known for this comic book and I have plans to publish it with Amazon this year. So when you are faced with a difficult situation, if you have the right positive mental attitude toward the calamity, it’s possible with your creativity to turn it into a blessing and change your fortune, as I did with revisiting my Farm Boy comic around 10 years after I first created it when I was forced to focus on different art and activities.
How did you build your audience on social media?
Luckily for Start Shows, before Thais and I founded our company, we had footage from 6 previous art shows at One Art Space gallery that we were able to share to our instagram @startshows page. Thais made some great clips mashing up the footage as our initial posts of the 6 shows we had done prior to “Jump into the Art” our first art exhibition that we organized at Jump into the Light which used to be in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, NYC. What helped us greatly to build our audience, was 3 things. The first and most important are Instagram sponsored ads. I highly recommend IG or Facebook ads (IG ads in my opinion are more powerful through experience trying both, especially for artists). The reason why I recommend them is that Facebook has what’s called the Facebook pixel. It’s a piece of software that is able to target the EXACT audience that you’re looking for for your artwork or business because you are able to customize the settings of the ads, including the demographics of who will see the ads by Age range, gender, location and targeted interests. So say you are acrylic painter and you want to promote your art for an upcoming art show using the flyer of the show and images of your paintings. You can add interests of people who like paintings (you can customize it to oil, acrylic or watercolor), art exhibitions, contemporary art galleries, etc. Facebook knows who likes what on their platform because people often time list their interests on their pages. This helps Facebook give you targeted traffic to your ad and you can customize if people will be directed to your profile, website or be able to send you a direct message through the ad.
It has worked WONDERS for our business in being able to reach the audience that is looking for what we offer and we are not alone. That’s why there are ads after every other post or story you look at because if you write good copy (captions) and your images or video is good for the ad and you’re offering a product or service people want, you will have success. Another great thing about sponsored ads is that you can see the metrics and numbers. So you can evaluate how the ad performs and if you have to tweak your ads in the future by shrinking the age group, or number of interests. IG will tell you what age group and gender most sees and engages with your ad so its an amazing feature on the platform.
Another way we built our audience is through collaborations with other accounts that have a larger following than us. We are lucky to have great sponsors for our show that work hard to give the artists extra features and benefits because they are featured in our show. For example our sponsor @weknowcity has around 140,000 followers on IG. Thank you Althea of We Know City for helping us gain more visibility! Collaborations are a great way to build your following by sharing followers who see your posts with the nifty collaboration option on IG, its super easy, all you have to do is click the tag feature on a post or reel and then add the account you want to collaborate with as a collaborator and if the account accepts it, your post will show on your feed and theirs.
The final advice I can give to people starting to build their social media presence is to engage with other accounts in your niche (field). Make interesting and thoughtful comments on their page, share posts you like from their accounts to your stories, answer comments, like posts and explore the explore page and hashtag page for things you are generally interested in.
If you apply these 3 things and believe in yourself and ability to grow your social media, you’ll go far!
Contact Info:
- Website: startshowsnyc.com sophotoons.com
- Instagram: @startshows @farmboynft
- Facebook: START
- Linkedin: Sophocles Plokamakis
- Twitter: startshowsnyc
- Youtube: START SHOWS
- Other: Tiktok: @Startshows
Image Credits
Larry Leventhal @larryosan