The little atelier that could

In a row of postcard-perfect art deco resorts on Collins Avenue sits the Catalina, a smaller hotel with modestly sized rooms and red shag carpet-lined halls. As site of the Bridge Art Fair, for four days the hotel’s 60-plus rooms have been stripped of furniture and converted into intimate exhibition spaces for galleries from the U.S. and Europe.

This year marks the debut of Bridge, which is the brainchild of the folks who run the Nova Art Fair yearly in Chicago and Basel, Switzerland. Where the main fair—Art Basel Miami Beach, held at the city’s convention center—aims at blue chip collectors with offerings from A-list artists, the smaller, alternative fairs like Bridge set their sights on a crowd with a smaller budget and a willingness to discover new talent.

While price tags in the hundreds of thousands are no surprise at the big Basel fair, around $2500 seems to be the limit for most Bridge buyers, says Erika Greenberg-Schneider, whose Tampa Heights gallery and print atelier, Blue Acier, scored one of the coveted rooms.

During the fair, she’ll sell her heart out in an effort to make up for slow business in Tampa, where her gallery is supported largely by the printed editions she turns out for clients in major U.S. cities and Europe and by teaching at USF. The artists she represents tend to fit into one of two categories: graduate students and professors she has met during her tenure at the university—MFA grads Marie Yoho Dorsey and Steve McClure, professors Elisabeth Condon and Neil Bender—and mid-career European artists like painter Herve di Rosa and her husband, sculptor Dominique Labauvie. Most of her prices fall in the $1000 range, though some of the established European artists she represents easily command $5000 for a work.

“Dominique has had five one-man shows at Basel, Switzerland. People come to see him because he’s famous in Europe,” she says.

Conducting business in the cramped hotel room can be a hairy proposition. Its diminutive dimensions—roughly 12-ft. square, plus a tiny bathroom, where art hangs on the shower door—make for close quarters when Schneider, a helper or two, and a prospective buyer cluster around her display table. As a small crowd amasses to take a look at the work she’s brought—a variety of paintings, prints, multi-media, and metal sculptures—elbows start to collide.

“I’ve seen more people in two days than in a year in Tampa,” she says. “And I’ve sold more in two days than in two years in Tampa.”

Selling to Bridge buyers comes with its own challenges. Many are on the hunt for something to fit a specific space or match a particular color scheme, Schneider says. Already, she has fielded requests for paintings on square-shaped paper (when an artist’s work used mainly rectangular sheets), prints in red ink (when the originals were in blue), and custom-sized versions of a metal-and-glass table by Labauvie. Except for the change in ink color, she has accommodated—or at least attempted—the changes.

Marie Dorsey’s landscape photogravures have been a bestseller. The suite of four images got a plum spot in the hallway outside the gallery’s room, where many visitors linger while making the rounds. The prints, four different renditions of the same mountain landscape during spring, summer, fall, and winter, were displayed at the Tampa Museum of Art this summer during the underCURRENT/overVIEW exhibition.

Many visitors express surprise that Bleu Acier is based in Tampa, Schneider says. It’s not a selling point—often she has to explain that she represents European artists and USF professors who have New York credentials before potential buyers are willing to take a serious look, she says. When we discuss whether Tampa could ever support something even remotely like Miami Basel, she’s skeptical, to say the least.

“The thing in Tampa is: we have to realize who we are, and we’re nothing as far as the arts go. It’s going to stay that way until there’s a real venture happening, and that venture is not only private enterprises coming into town but it’s also the protocol, or the government, or arts people, which we do not have now,” she says. “It can’t [happen] unless you have the collector base.”

Schneider struggled to get support in Tampa for her Bridge endeavor. In the face of miserable gallery sales, she turned to the Arts Council of Hillsborough County, which does not ordinarily fund private, for-profit galleries, and managed to convince them to grant her $1000 to publish a catalog. At the fair, she proudly passes out copies as visitors pack the tiny room.

That grand, as grateful as she is to have it, was a drop in the bucket compared to the roughly $12,000 in shipping, framing, exhibition fees, lodging, and other expenses she took on to come here. But with two days down and two days to go, she’s already managed to break even.

And now that she’s seen what’s selling, she’s ready to rearrange her tiny temporary gallery for maximum effect.

“If it’s not selling, it’s out. I’m not here to promote, I’m here to sell. If it’s not selling, it’s relegated to the bathroom,” she says.

Pictured: (1) Erika Greenberg-Schneider, owner of Tampa’s Blue Acier, talks with prospective buyers in a converted hotel room. (2) Bouquet by USF professor Neil Bender (3) A painting by USF professor Elisabeth Condon, whose work has sold well—check out that vibrant blue!

This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2006.