We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alex Conner a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Alex thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

With COMMONWEAL it was very important to me to begin opening up a dialog with patrons, collectors and the general audience about artworks and pricing.

One of the few positives of the global COVID-19 pandemic is that it was a period for businesses and organizations to be able to step back and critically engage with what had become ‘standard practices’ in their industries. Through recognizing that this tumultuous time would certainly result in newly emerging models of engagement and logistical challenges, there was a freedom in being able to question what had become tradition. Pricing and finance in the commercial art world has long been opaque to not only outsiders but even those within the industry. The purpose of this is manifold, but stems from historical luxury retail practices, concerns for privacy and mostly because art is a qualitative industry that occupies a space of ambiguity in relation to quantitative pricing structures.

Many aspects give an artwork commercial value: how well the work captures the concerns of a people at a time and place, its scarcity, the churn of cultural focus as well as historical commercial success (or lack thereof) of an artist. Many art galleries hide the price of the artworks they exhibit in ways as simple as keeping it on a private sheet of paper that is controlled by gallery staff and handed out to patrons upon request or in a extreme cases as an internal calculation done in the moment by gallery staff after surveying a collector’s interest and asking questions about their intent for the work at hand—will they live with it? donate it? allow it to be loaned for exhibitions? It was important to me to clear away these prickly shibboleths in order to welcome more people into the field as emerging collectors of contemporary art.

Pricing at COMMONWEAL is transparent—it is reflected both in the gallery and online. I will happily engage in conversations about how and why certain levels of pricing have been arrived at. In this way, instead of keeping people in the dark regarding a relatively large part of the art market puzzle, I meet them where they are at and help them understand how finite value is applied to cultural objects circumscribed with less rigorous boundaries. It makes my clients not only feel more “in the know” but also comfortable setting expectations for finding art they want to collect and live with for many years to come.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I started COMMONWEAL Gallery in 2021, having been part of Philadelphia’s vibrant art scene as a curator, educator and entrepreneur since 2008, with the goal of championing the talented voices and visions of visual artists in our city. Skills gained from working at The Barnes Foundation and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as while Director of Business Development for a local fabrication company assisted me in the creation of a strong curatorial program and a resilient business model over the past three years.

Since its inception, COMMONWEAL Gallery has hosted over twenty exhibitions featuring over fifty artists, placing works in museum, organizational and private collections. In March of 2024, I launched COMMONWEAL Art Advisory to work more closely with individuals and businesses to discover and invest in the dynamic and valuable artistic talents emerging from our wonderful city. I believe that while every collection is structured differently and every client’s concerns are unique, there is no client for which thought-provoking and appropriate artwork cannot be acquired.

I’ve distinguished COMMOWNEAL in the commercial contemporary gallery sector of Philadelphia through three distinct efforts. The first is maintaining a consistent vision guided by the business plan I put together over three months in 2020. The second is my ever-growing knowledge of the emerging local trends amongst artists’ practices, informed by the dozens of studio visits I do each month, and how they map on to evolving national and global conversations. And the third is my understanding of, but allergy to, artworld argot. It’s important to be able to speak with everyone about why art is important, not just a select few, or else how could I hope to grow the community that supports these vibrant artistic visions?

It’s important to me to stress that good art makes space—it doesn’t just take it up. Collecting, living with and working around contemporary art is an activity. It isn’t about placing some passive object on the floor or wall and forgetting about it. Instead, it’s about the everyday experience of meeting a work of art at different stages in our lives and with those interactions unfolding a conversation about our relationship to it, and through it, the worlds it touches upon.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I’m a classic overthinker and always have been. In putting together the strategies for developing COMMONWEAL I tried to come up with solutions for all the possible contingencies I could imagine and, because this was during 2020, had plenty of time to dedicate to it. When the business opened in 2021, immediately situations arose which I hadn’t had the previous experience or expectation to predict. I wanted to be able to take the time I felt was required to again figure out all the possible routes my decision-making could take, but realized that now that I was in the thick of it this was not an option.  Running a business requires preparation, diligence and hard work but also the ability to trust your instincts. It was during this time I came across the mantra—thought where it is from I couldn’t tell you—that “the perfect is the enemy of the good”. I realized I didn’t have to make the perfect decision each time, just the good one and that by trusting my experience, knowledge and intuition, would get there. This approach made making decisions a lot more efficient and satisfying.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

The largest (read: most logistically complex and expensive) exhibition I have put on was this past September. It was a survey of one body of work created over fifty years by a phenomenal 89 year-old artist from Philadelphia called Anne Minich. The series documents her struggles with family, friends, religion, sexuality and identity and is captured in 37 works.

To assemble the series as fully as possible I had to work in tandem with four museums and nine private collectors, in addition to the artist. It was a daunting undertaking and with the additional money on shipping and insurance I was spending, I had to make sure it would be worth it and people would be excited to come out and collect works that were available.

Years prior I had come across a strange object, which was a musical record printed on a thin sheet of plastic. I thought it was interesting and it lodged itself in the back of my mind as something that would be a fun promotional object. Knowing that the marketing materials for this exhibition had to be of great interest to bring people out this idea resurfaced as an option. With the rise in interest in vinyl players over the past decade I investigated and found out that there is one company in Eastern Europe which prints postcards that have a thin coating on them in which a record can be similarly pressed. It lasts for about five plays, which has a beautiful ephemeral quality. I thought it would be wonderful to have Anne record two minutes talking about the work in the exhibition and press this onto postcards to send.

However, it was quite expensive to produce-basically my entire marketing budget for a show thrown into one object-so I knew it had to pay for itself. After hemming and hawing I decided to go for it and had 250 made, which I then mailed out to collectors, arts professionals and the media. On the opening night of the exhibition we were slammed with over 400 people, resulting in very strong sales. I had dozens of guests come up to me and share how infatuated they were with this simple object and that it forced them to want to know more about the exhibition it advertised. As a piece of marketing it not only mirrored the voice of the artist in a tangible way but also the fragility of some of the subjects in the works, which struck a chord. I do not regret taking the leap to produce something uniquely engaging.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.commonweal.gallery
• Instagram: commonnweal.gallery
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/company/commonweal-gallery