It Takes a Village: On This Spot NYC’s Co-Founder Loretta Howard Discusses Digital Empowerment and Storytelling - Grit Daily News (2024)

In 2019, a joint investigation by Artnet News and In Other Words showed that since 2008, only 29,247 out of a total of 260,470 artworks that entered prominent US museums’ permanent collections were works by women. To recenter the narratives of women artists and ensure their rightful place in art history, On This Spot NYC produces short-form documentaries dedicated to spotlighting the artistic legacy of a diverse group of women artists, the known and the unknown, who lived in NYC at various stages of their careers.

Astutely aware of the impact of digital outreach, On This Spot NYC is available on Bloomberg Connects and is actively seeking to maximize its engagement with viewers on social media platforms such as YouTube and Instagram. In this interview, On This Spot’s co-founder Loretta Howard discusses the mission’s alignment with the changing landscape of digital media, as well as her experience as a feminist entrepreneur.

JW: What inspired you to start On This Spot NYC? Was making short-form documentaries the initial idea? Or was the format something that developed over time?

LH: It was so natural. My co-founder, Tony Ganz, is a Hollywood producer and scriptwriter. When he and his wife Gail, who is also a film producer, were in London, they had seen all the wonderful English Heritage blue plaques for noteworthy people. When he came to New York, he was surprised that there was no plaque outside the home of Eva Hesse.

We were talking about this, and I said that it would be wonderful to know who lived where, given that New York has such an incredibly rich history behind closed doors, especially in the postwar era. We looked into how to get plaques, but it turned out that getting a bronze plaque is a very complicated and expensive process. A lot of landlords don’t want them. At the end of the day, they don’t say much: just the name, date, and however many words you can fit on a tiny plaque. Therefore, we decided instead to do digital markers.

We had been talking about it for years, but life got in the way. Fast forward to the pandemic: All of a sudden, I found myself not in the gallery. Time seemed to stretch out endlessly. I had just finished Mary Gabriel’s book Ninth Street Women, which told stories from the women artists’ perspective — how hard the struggle was: they paid $9 in rent, or they ate out of a can, or they went to every opening — beautifully researched details about their lives.

For the shows at the gallery that I ran and still run online, we publish scholarly catalogs followed by a short video tour of the exhibition, which can be done extremely easily with a tripod and an iPhone. You can add a voiceover to the video and post it online. In our data analytics, we found that people preferred the short-form videos to the long scholarly essays that required extensive reading. That’s how we came to the format of video documentaries. And, of course, Tony is a filmmaker, so storytelling is something he has devoted his entire life to.

We started with much longer formats — around 11 minutes. It was very cumbersome to explain these artists’ entire careers, and it seemed that we weren’t going to get anywhere on this project unless we make them more doable and focused “on the spot.” For instance, artists like Helen Frankenthaler were enormously itinerant, partly because of New York City real estate.

Focusing on a specific address and what an artist did there made the project more doable and reduced the lengths of the videos to 2–3 minutes. Therefore, we did a lot of work during the pandemic and applied for our 501(c)(3). But the truth is that the idea started years before, and COVID-19 gave us time to actually start working on it.

JW: Is that how the name of the non-profit came about?

LH: Exactly.

JW: What do you love the most about Spot videos?

LH: I really love the archival aspect of this project. In traditional print publishing, say, for a magazine article, you would have a photo shoot and choose one or two images that are quintessential — the best. We see a photographer take their grease pencil and circle the one that they want, like the picture of Joan Mitchell that Irving Sandler published in ARTnews for the article, “Mitchell Paints a Picture.” You see it again and again and again. It’s absolutely beautiful. There’s Joan with her brushes and the painting behind her. She’s young, tough, and determined — you see all of that in one picture. But because we are trying to make a video, we asked the Joan Mitchell Foundation how many more pictures they had from that photo shoot, and they sent us 30. You would never publish 30 pictures for a magazine article, but when we put them in our Mitchell video, it is almost as if you can watch her move.

Another example was our video about the Club. The estate of Fred McDarrah had never scanned the entire contact sheet. When we got the entire contact sheet, it was as if you could see inside the Club. You might have seen the one picture of two guys with coffee cups on folding chairs before. But now you can see all of it.

I have been a Louise Nevelson fan my whole life. For the Nevelson video in Season 2, her granddaughter said, oh, you should be in touch with Pedro, who took a lot of photos of her. And there were things that I’ve never seen, such as photos inside the house. It’s amazing! We got really lucky. There is something unique about this archival digging to be used in video format. You come across things you have never seen before.

JW: What are the differences and similarities between running a gallery and a non-profit?

LH: A gallery is a small business that requires you to be sales-driven. But really, running a non-profit is not that different in the sense that we still have mouths to feed and bills to pay. But instead of selling objects, we’re selling an idea. It’s the idea that we want to commemorate history that is not preservable in any other form than storytelling, done in a way readily accessible to millions of people. For the non-profit, one of the biggest challenges is definitely funding — development and fundraising. I’ve never written any grants before because I’ve always sold art objects. But this is an exciting challenge.

JW: What’s your definition of success for On This Spot?

LH: The quality factor is essential. The unanimous feedback we get from our viewers is that everybody thinks these videos are good. With today’s social media algorithm, a lot of content can get millions of views, such as someone petting a puppy dog. In our case, we very much want our videos to “go viral” and to reach as many people as we can, especially those who are not in New York or not necessarily interested in art — people outside the rather insular art world. Therefore, it’s both about the quality/depth and the reach of our videos.

JW: What do you think of social media? What is On This Spot’s relationship with social media like?

LH: It is a part of our lives now. I look at my children on social media. In the pandemic, I felt connected to people because I could look at my Instagram feed and see that someone’s cooking, someone’s taking a walk, and someone’s up in Maine, etc. It is the language we are speaking and the tool we are using for connectivity and information.

I prefer to watch Spot videos on a laptop or a bigger screen because the photographs are so beautiful and fascinating. The small scale of a phone prevents you from fully seeing all the details, but this is the way people are watching things now. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was the head of Disney, had started a platform called Quibi.

Although it was a failed project, there were millions of dollars behind the market research, which basically showed that films were becoming shorter and shorter and watched on smaller and smaller devices. In short, you would be watching videos when waiting for something, or when you’re in transit on the subway.

However, at the same time, we are not built entirely for this purpose. In fact, as you know, had we built On This Spot entirely for social media, it would have been in a vertical format. We are really just focused on the ability to watch these videos anytime and anywhere, which is enormously appealing.

JW: Can you tell us a little more about the partnership with Bloomberg Connects?

LH: It developed over time. We were hoping that Bloomberg would support us because they seemed like such a logical partner: they are interested in technology, arts, entertainment, and the history of New York City specifically. They also focus on educational content and digital engagement. In our early conversations with them, they helped us organize the way we would present these videos — neighborhood by neighborhood — so that we can achieve a certain density of stories in one location.

JW: What advice would you give to aspiring women entrepreneurs?

LH: Kathleen Landy at the Feminist Institute, who is an amazing supporter of On This Spot, was very kind to speak with me early on. I asked her what advice she had for me, and she said: “Be patient. It will happen, you know.”

And I keep on trying to channel Kathy’s words, but of course, I am incredibly impatient. I want this to happen, but it is indeed a long process — much longer than I had anticipated. Putting up an exhibition in a gallery can be doable in a number of months, but before you launch something like On This Spot to the public, you need support, legal clearance, platforms, editors, the website, etc. It’s just a longer haul. So be patient, I suppose, is the advice.

It is also incredibly important to reach out to others and form a support network. There are a number of people, estates, and institutions who have supported us very early on. The New York Public Library was our very first partner, and then the list continues: the Feminist Institute, the Public Art Fund, the Brooklyn Rail, and so on.

JW: How have you grown personally since starting On This Spot?

LH: It is the most wonderful thing that has happened to me in my career. My world has gotten larger. In the past, given the nature of my gallery and my specialty, which is postwar American abstraction, I felt as if I stayed in my lane. With this project, however, I am no longer just interested in the same group of people but in finding new stories that have never been told or a new way of telling those stories. It’s been the most fun to be out of my box and into the larger world, meeting people and learning new things.