We were lucky to catch up with Evan Bradbury recently and have shared our conversation below.
Evan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear from you about what you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry and why it matters.
I have never thought of myself as an entrepreneur. Carnelian Art Gallery is not a business. We absolutely have bills to pay, gas tanks and stomachs to fill but our mission isn’t to succeed but to begin. Madison, WI has a lot of creative energy, and creative, courageous and curious people. I’ve lived in Madison for most of my life and I’ve met a lot of them. We do not yet have an environment where artists are able to rely on their creativity, courage and curiosity to fill those tanks and stomachs. Gallery’s like ours have gambled for millennia on the creation of a world where artists are able to make art so that galleries are able to show, share, and sell that art so that homes can be filled with beauty thereby making artists and around and around it goes. Having done the New York scene and being lucky enough to see art in several different major European markets, i know first-hand that smarter people than i have figured out how to accomplish this but while Carnelian grows and learns the hope is to add what we can to the snowball wherever and whenever we can in the hopes that soon we’ll have our avalanche. Our success will not look like a perfectly executed business plan. It will look like “competition.” With luck and hard work we hope to see more galleries that we have nothing to do with. We want more artist studios and maker-spaces and supply stores and blogs and pods and zines. We want to further that beautiful, truly American lie that “you can be or do or make whatever you want when you grow up” until it is true for all of us. And it would be nice to be able to buy paint AND nice wool socks for the winter.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Carnelian Art Gallery opened March 1st of 2024. We are located a block away from our beautiful capitol at 221 KZing St. Suite 102. We focus on showing and selling all manner of visual art and offer several artist studio spaces for rent as well. We are currently booked out through 2024 but are always open to receiving artist and show submissions. We are young and hungry and agile so anything is possible but the plan as of now is to host small group shows to run for 2 months back to back to back. It has been truly amazing how many artists have already reached out but we still very much want to meet the rest of you.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
We are young and energetic and still have a lot to learn. We were lucky enough to work with an amazing design team as well as an amazing contracting firm on the build out but even they had never built an art gallery before. And even then the process was great. We truly felt heard and involved while also being taken care of by very capable hands but a snag that we ran into that is funny now, after the fact was the lighting. We had picked out and successfully installed a beautiful but crazy expensive track lighting system in the middle of a “floating island” style drop ceiling that covered our pipes but still created this beautiful sense of added height in the space. The lesson learned the hard way was that in order for track lighting to adequately illuminate art on the walls there is a tricky little bit of trigonometry involved. Please don’t tell Ms Reddy that I regret not paying more attention in trig class. The lighting needs to be at X height and Y distance from the wall to center the beam of light at point Z on the wall. Ooops. It could have been worse for sure but we now have a lighting system installed perfectly that we payed for twice.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
As an art gallery there exists a strange new way of looking at art that most people never have to learn. As an artist I have spent my life developing my own sense of what is “good” and what is “completed” and what speaks to the point I’m trying to make. A contemporary art gallery in a young market needs to abandon all of that. We all of us have our own story that most others might never fully understand. We come from different places and at different times with different desires and all are valid. At Carnelian we strive to celebrate art and artists from as diverse and complex a background and upbringing as possible. There is, i imagine, a perfect bulls-eye where the art is beautiful and challenging and impactful AND commercial and we can all agree that “this is good.” We’ll be sure to let you know when we find it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Www.carnelianart.com
- Instagram: Carnelianartgallery
- Facebook: Carnelian Art Gallery
