This is an obituary. Like most obituaries, it is paid for by the
survivors—in this case, by Michael Rivera-Dirks, the former owner
of Viveza Art Experience, the Belltown gallery that closed at the end
of 2007. He purchased this obituary through Strangercrombie.
It’s an unusual obituary in that businesses don’t usually want their
demises
documented. What use is publicity to them at that
point?
Rivera-Dirks has his reasons. He still wants to promote the artists
he believes in, chief among them Casey Curran, Francesca Berrini,
Raymond Morrow, Doug Smithenry, Eric Olson, and Eva Speer. Plus, he
wants to thank and to encourage the 125 people who bought art at his
gallery since it opened in July 2003, many of them first-time
collectors.
The cause of death is, basically, exhaustion. When Rivera-Dirks
opened the gallery, he was a wide-eyed and energetic 28; now, he’s
nearly 33 and in dire need of a beach sabbatical. He sank $200,000 of
his own money into the gallery and didn’t earn a cent. This past
December, he introduced his artists to the larger art market by taking
their works to Art Now, a satellite fair to Art Basel Miami
Beach—it took a lot of money and effort, but he only sold two
pieces.
“It’s a hard business,” Rivera-Dirks says with a sigh, giving me a
tour of the loft gallery. Art remains on the walls, but the space has
been staged as an upscale condo,
since it’s for sale.
Our meeting was at 8:00 a.m., before
Rivera-Dirks commuted to
his full-time job as a marketing manager at Microsoft.
“My strategy for Viveza was the belief that if we could set
ourselves up to exist for a virtually unlimited period of time,
financially and energetically, we’d eventually be able to become
successful,” he wrote in an e-mail. “We would learn from our mistakes,
we would continue coming up with new ideas to tackle the business, we’d
learn and we’d grow… This is a good strategy except for one
underlying faulty assumption: That I would be able to maintain the
energy required to work full-time in a demanding job while still trying
to work half-time (with helpful staff) on the gallery business.”
Rivera-Dirks toiled for his artists, said Curran, who makes delicate
and intricate wire-and-found-object wall sculptures with moving parts.
(Curran is now represented at Gallery IMA.)
Rivera-Dirks “discovered” Curran at the Cornish College of the Arts
BFA show in 2006—where Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was also
checking out Curran’s stuff—and offered him a solo show on the
spot.
“He definitely went the extra mile for his artists,” Curran said of
Rivera-Dirks. “He printed up about 6,000 fliers for my show. He bought
a piece of everybody’s work for his own place. He’s an art lover.”
When the gallery first opened, Rivera-Dirks slept there, pulling his
inflatable bed out of the upstairs closet every night and
lying
down under the creepy shadows of a Dia de los Muertos show. That didn’t
last long. Neither did his lack of a business plan, and by the third
year, Rivera-Dirks had also developed a guiding aesthetic—he
called it “the aesthetic of complexity,” meaning that each work fires
on multiple levels—and a monthly payment plan for intimidated
buyers. (Viveza showed mostly painting
and sculpture, not prints,
which are less expensive.)
In an attempt to streamline the business through outsourcing,
Rivera-Dirks employed a virtual assistant based in Ukraine and a
publicist from Dubuque, Iowa. They worked out well, he said. Freelance
researchers from India, not so much.
Rivera-Dirks got into the business in the first place simply to be
involved in the arts—or to stay involved. In 2001, he had founded
the Viveza Friend Film Festival, where he provided equipment and
classes to anyone who wanted to make a short video and hold public
screenings at Seattle theaters. Back then, Rivera-Dirks was an artist
himself, making films and videos exploring “complex systems.” He earned
double degrees, in film production and computer science, at the
University of Iowa.
Getting out of the gallery racket may be good for him. He may make
his own work again, or simply rediscover the pleasant labor of amateur
appreciation.
“Running a gallery is not like being in the art world,” Rivera-Dirks
said. “There’s nothing worse than: Oh, there’s a great work! Now…
how are we going to sell it?“
