Miguel Edwards is a sculptor and public artist born and raised in northern New Mexico, who built his early career in Seattle before building a shop in Bend, Oregon. Much of his work is large scale, site specific public installation, concentrated around Puget Sound, alongside gallery representation stretching from Santa Fe and Seattle to Carmel and Palm Desert and exhibitions abroad. He has also worked on multiple award winning films. Like a lot of artists, though, the business side of that career was always the harder half: the grant applications, the image lists, the endless duplicate paperwork that eats the hours meant for the studio. Miguel had known for a while that his growing stress and anxiety around this side of the work were problems worth solving proactively, not just tolerating. His time helping run the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle had shown him this was a common theme among artists, not just his own.
The moment it clicked was almost comically familiar: deep into a proposal he'd started early, he found himself at the eleventh hour building an image list from scratch, again, for a call that was hosted through CaFE and should never have required rebuilding that data by hand. The next day he started building PieceKeeper: a canonical record of every piece of work an artist makes, built once and exportable into image lists, viewing rooms, websites, labels, PDFs, newsletters, and more.
The excitement of solving that one pain point quickly turned into something bigger: ArtistBuilt.studio, a modular toolset for artists of every kind of practice. Miguel is uniquely positioned to build it, having worked as an arts administrator, a filmmaker, and production staff on large events, sitting on both sides of the funding table over the years. ArtistBuilt is the result of decades of experience, built to make it easier to stay in the flow of creativity and inspiration by spending less time on the admin, applications, and promotion that come with it.
The modules he's most excited about are PieceKeeper and Reach, the CRM and marketing hub, along with the website builder, but especially Armature, an in-depth project management tool built specifically for public art commissions. Armature includes a submodule called Penumbra that lets a public artist light a piece virtually and natively, so he can interface directly with developers and project managers on where the electrical needs to go. Miguel is excited to share this at CODAsummit and collaborate with artists on those nuanced gaps he may have missed.
https://artistbuilt.studio
www.migueledwards.com
CODAsummit Attendees:
Miquel has a show at the LaRoche Gallery at 415 Canyon Road, in Santa Fe. He will be at the gallery on Tues., September 29th from 3-5pm. Refreshments will be served from 3-7 for CODAsummit Badgeholders.
https://www.laroche-gallery.com
