Why Artist Registration for GO Continues to Surprise Me
As Sharon mentioned in her post yesterday, we continue to get a lot of questions and wanted to answer a few of them prior to the artist registration period coming to an end. We see this one a lot, “I’m considering registering as an artist for this event, but I’m somewhat curious if there are any other artists participating in my neighborhood of Brooklyn. In my experience, foot traffic is pretty light out where I am and before I commit to holing up in my studio for an entire weekend, I’d like to know if anyone is actually going to make the trek out there.”
As we go into our final day of registration, we are seeing that studios will open in 46 of Brooklyn’s 67 neighborhoods and the scope is both wide and surprising. You’d think this might be all about high-traffic neighborhoods and while those areas do have the most registrations, it’s not an overwhelming majority of them. You may be interested to learn that 117 artists have registered in Bushwick, while Greenpoint has 113 and Sunset Park, 100. What we’ve really been inspired by is how the project is reaching so many neighborhoods in Brooklyn with strong pockets of artist registration coming in from the areas of Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, Park Slope, Cobble Hill…and so many more. The project seems to really speaking to artists who don’t have access to the more structured open studios that happen every year in high density neighborhoods. This is not something we expected, but something we are now incredibly proud of.
As you consider whether or not to open your studio, we want you to know that the more participants we have in the project overall, the stronger GO becomes. Simply put, more open studios everywhere will encourage greater visitation and that means more eyes on your work, which is one thing we hope to accomplish.
While we can’t predict visitor behavior on September 8 and 9, we hope you’ll broaden your thinking about what could happen. How visitors will travel on these days may surprise all of us and we think it’s worth taking leap to see what happens. After all, as Sharon stated yesterday, there are a lot of good reasons to take part.
You have 1 day left to register your studio and publish your profile for GO. If you need help, please see our support area. Better yet, come to our artist info session and registration blitz at Dekalb Market tonight from 5-8pm.
