The Right Audience -

Louis Caldor had a stomach ache.

That’s what led the engineer into the local drugstore that would change his life.

By chance he saw what was on display in the Woman’s Exchange section of the drugstore. At this time in the early twentieth century, the Women Exchange was a way for women to make money by selling homemade goods without working outside the house.

He saw something that shook him to the very core.

What did he see?

Among the array of jellies and rugs he saw paintings selling for $3 and $5.

And because Louis Caldor wasn’t only an engineer who worked for the New York City Department of Water Supply, but also an art collector, he quickly bought them and then asked the drugstore owner for the name of the artist.

He visited the artist Anna Mary Robertson Moses, a woman who’d started painting at seventy-eight, and bought ten more paintings—certain he’d found an extraordinary talent.

But his excitement wasn’t shared.

He spent a year promoting the work of this regional artist to the New York City art scene without success and thought of giving up.

Until…

He heard of a show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for unknown painters.

Caldor took the work to curator, Sidney Janis, who also collected works by Patrick J Sullivan and Morris Hirshfield who also painted in what was called the ‘primitive’ or ‘naïve’ styles of Moses.

He agreed to display three paintings.

Bolstered by this success, Caldor decided to find more outlets and heard about a new gallery owner, Otto Kallir, who was interested in folk art.

And soon the work of Anna Mary Robertson Moses, better known as Grandma Moses, would gain international fame.

But Grandma Moses’ work had been on display in the past, at craft fairs, where her preserves outshone her paintings. And had she tried to enter the New York art scene on her own she would have been dismissed.

So, whenever you’re discouraged when your work is being disregarded or ignored, think about this story.

Grandma Moses began creating yarn pictures in her sixties until severe arthritis forced her to exchange needles for a paintbrush.

Impressed by her work, Moses’ son and daughter-in-law decided to display her work in the Woman’s Exchange.

Which gave Louis Caldor a chance to see it and buy it.

That led to a year of failure to get her work acknowledged until he managed to convince a curator (who was putting together a show for unknown painters and also had similar tastes to his own) to display it.

He then convinced a gallery owner who had a passion for folk art to show it.

The art didn’t change.

The audience did.

And that’s why finding the right audience is essential.

Put your work out there; keep it out there…until the right people get a chance to see it.

And tell the others.

Because you don’t need everyone.

You need someone.

That’s how to build and maintain a career.

(Artist Background Source: Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You about Reinventing Your Life by Henry Oliver)