Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland: Benefit Gala Auction

Hi everyone, @awillbrown here - let's explore where exhibitions and programs can take us and how Steemit can be a major force in creating new content and supporting ideas. My blogging will start with some history of the exhibition, at least through the last few hundred years, and continue with interesting examples of projects and exhibitions happening today.

Benefit Gala at MOCA Cleveland

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For a brief refresher, the weekend of October 6th and 7th marked a series of important milestones for my institution, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. We launched our Fall exhibitions, (A Poethical Wager, Phil Collins: my heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught, and Jason Salavon: Rainbow Aggregator) held our annual benefit Gala including an art auction, and celebrated the 5th anniversary of our new Museum building. My last post discussed our current exhibitions, which opened on October 6th, and the events surrounding the benefit auction and birthday celebration. However, we haven't yet covered the benefit auction itself!

As I noted, fundraising is always a challenge at contemporary arts institutions without permanent collections to bolster funder's sustained interest and provide a foundation upon which to build a more fixed narrative. Since we are constantly evolving both our exhibitions model and content gaining long term support of foundations, individuals, and corporate partners is a little more difficult, we have to 'sell' our work constantly. This brings excitement too, and a bevy of new connections, artists, and institutions to work with.

Like many institutions, MOCA has an annual benefit gala that includes a night of fun, food, celebration and an art auction: all of this to raise money for the institution and build new networks. This year, like most years, our benefit auction included two components, a silent auction and a live auction. Our auctions were facilitated by Paddle 8, which is an online platform and organization that manages auctions for individuals, institutions, and connects collectors to galleries. Paddle 8 can also be a great source of aggregated information about many contemporary artist's exhibition histories, biographies, styles of work, and actual work examples. Our silent auction was presented on MOCA's ground floor in a temporary gallery space that resembled an art fair booth or small gallery. The live auction was presented on stage during the gala, one work at a time, like the type of auction we are all familiar with. In total both auctions included 46 artworks by a range of established and emerging artists from around the world including highlights: Liu Wei, Roxy Paine, Michelle Grabner, Adam Pendleton, Lisa Oppenheim, Amanda Ross-Ho, Anoka Faruqee, Ken Lum, and Eva Rothschild.

For each artist we compiled a host of information, or rather my co-worker Kate and I did, with the help of three fantastic interns. An auction is a huge amount of information gathering, editing, vetting, and getting approved by various parties. Take a look at this screen shot from Amanda Ross-Ho's page on our Paddle 8 auction.

A 250 word bio, the artwork title, date, materials, size, image and donation credit! When you're doing 46 of these from almost 40 different galleries, individuals, and artists who donated the works formatting and editing is quite the chore. However, this is of the utmost importance and has to happen well in advance of the auction itself.

In the end we sold much of the artwork, both silent and live and made a substantial amount of money, around $400,000 to support our Programs and Exhibitions. It was a success, a trial, and an exciting series of events.

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Stay tuned for my next post, which will dig into some historic exhibitions and start us down a path of exploration!

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