We have just uploaded the Feb. 2011 issue of Carolina Arts (www.carolinaarts.com). Downloading the entire PDF file is the best way to view the paper – then you can enlarge the pages to any size you like. That’s what 9,000 people did last month.

This month the paper is 51 pages or 50 and 1/8. Our gallery listings were a little longer this month. There’s lot of stuff there about exhibits taking place in the Carolinas and some other things – a little commentary by me. Judith McGrath is back with us – all the way for down under. Her words are as popular as ever – her past articles received a lot of interest last month.

If you like what you see and decide you want to participate in our next issue – either with content or to advertise an exhibit, visual art event or your art – our deadline for the Mar. 2011 issue will be Feb. 24. Here’s a link to our advertising info (http://www.carolinaarts.com/advertising.html).

And, as always we ask that you to help us spread the news that we are still publishing Carolina Arts in any way you can – by e-mail, social media, or some good old gossip.
Don’t forget to support and thank our sponsors!

Tom Starland
Editor/Publisher
Carolina Arts

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You may or may not have heard that Carolina Arts has gone to an online version of the paper only. Our January issue is online now at (www.carolinaarts.com). Just click on the image of the paper’s cover and you can view the paper – page by page or download the entire paper as a PDF file to view it all together.

Believe me, downloading the entire PDF file to your desktop may take some time, but it is worth it in the end. Different browsers offer different challenges. If you have an iPhone or an iPad – putting the PDF file in iBooks works great.

Some people may have problems on older computers or older systems, but we’ll be working on making viewing the paper as easy as possible. Like I’ve said before, Linda and I are learning new things as we go. Change it our current motto.

We hope you will enjoy this new version of our paper. It is the largest we have ever produced – 49 pages – filled with articles about exhibits, color ads, color images of artworks, and pages and pages of gallery listings from throughout the Carolinas.

If you would like to be part of the February issue make sure you  contact us before Jan. 24 by 5pm.

When you’re finished checking it out – e-mail your friends or post the news on Facebook. And, don’t forget to thank our supporters in any way you can. Thanks.

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Well, the sagging economy has finally caught up with us. Well, it caught up with us a few years ago, but we just kept hoping things would get better by now and still hope they will in the near future, but for now, we are no longer printing the paper. We didn’t want to say anything about this to our readers before Christmas – we didn’t want to be a piece of coal in anyone’s stocking.

Linda and I have used every resource available to us to keep the paper going, and we want to thank all our loyal advertisers who have stood by us, those who still are, as well as Tri-State Printing, our printer, which has been at our side supporting us for a number of years. But, we just did not get enough ads to pay all the bills – so we are taking the paper online until we can get back to printing the paper – if not in its original form, in some form that best serves the Carolina visual art community and is profitable.

This was a hard decision to make, but we have dug a hole for ourselves and it will take some time to crawl out – which I hope we will with the help of people who are still willing to support our efforts. I’m also looking for a part time job.

This isn’t the first time we have suspended printing of the paper in our 23 year history. After Hurricane Hugo struck the Charleston area in 1989, we just kept on going like nothing had happened but, within a few months we found out differently – it would take almost a year for the art community to recover. When we came back we were stronger than ever. Before the end of the 90′s we had expanded throughout South Carolina and across the border into North Carolina. Eventually we went with a color cover for almost three years before the economy took a dive putting us back – in black & white. So change is always just around the corner.

But, before I move on to the future, I just want to say – if there are any individuals, groups, or angels out there who would like to help us out of that hole – please get in touch with us.

So what about the future?

Well, right off during the month of January there are going to be a lot of folks in shock when they go looking for a copy of Carolina Arts where they used to find them. For some, they will think – well, that’s the end of Carolina Arts. A few might even think – good riddance. We’re hoping most of these folks will go to our website – where they have found our online version of the paper for over 11 years to see what’s up.

Hopefully the word will spread that Carolina Arts is not dead, but living online. Hopefully readers, artists, gallery owners, arts organizations, art museums, and all sorts of followers will be talking about our new and improved online version of the paper and reading it.

We know there are a lot of people who like to hold something in their hands when they read it, and there is a whole new generation of people who read everything in an electronic format, whether on their desktop computers, laptop computers, iPads, and smart phones. We can’t do anything about people’s habits, but online publishing has its benefits.

First off, the paper we will be presenting will be in color. It will be in a PDF format which can be enlarged to the viewer’s liking. Ads will be able to be in color, color images will be offered in some articles, from time to time we’ll add some color graphics. Because space is not as limited in the electronic form we will now be able to add reception and lecture dates back into articles and add color images into the gallery listings to break up those massive pages of text. Articles about exhibits will be featured from throughout the Carolinas – even areas not included in the past in the printed paper.

Of course with an electronic version comes reduced ad rates – so some of our regular advertisers will be able to enlarge their ads and still save money, people who have thought about advertising, but never could fit it into their budgets, probably can now, and we’ll gain new advertisers from other areas of the Carolinas. One of our goals has always been to offer an informative visual arts paper people could afford to support. Info about advertising will be posted on our website at this link (http://www.carolinaarts.com/advertising.html).

Now, some people have asked, how will I know people are reading my articles and seeing my ads when the paper is in an electronic form only? How many people will see the paper? How big a list do you have to e-mail people the paper? Can my ad be linked so if someone clicks it they will go to my website or blog? Can I get a report on how many people see my ad or the page my ad and article are on each month? These are all questions we don’t have the answers to (yet) and I don’t think we could have answered all of them when we were in print.

We used to print 10,000 copies of the paper and distribute most in good months and about 90% in bad months (cold and hot months). It’s impossible for any publication beyond those numbers to tell you how many people read it and how many see your ad. Surveys just guess at it.

This is all new and it will take time to grow. You could run into people six months from now who didn’t even know we had stopped printing. I’ve run into to people who had articles printed in the paper who didn’t know it when talking to me and they had a vested interest in the paper, so there is a lot of mystery involved, but with electronic media – there are ways of getting some info.

We get over 300,000 hits on our website every month – sometimes 400,000. But these are people who might have spent just a few seconds on our site. We know over 50,000 viewers spend time on the site reading every month and those numbers are growing all the time, some months it jumps to 60,000. I wish I knew what got their attention in those months so I could keep up whatever attracted so many new viewers. And, these folks are spread all over the world.

I can tell you that some of our most popular pages on our site are Carolina Arts Unleashed (one of our blogs), the gallery listings (all four sets), articles about exhibits, past juried exhibit results, and a few links to articles about Winston O. Link, an amazing photographer who did nighttime photos of old trains. We offered that info in 1999, but people still like to look at the images. But we have over 22,000 elements on our website of 11 years. That’s articles, graphics and images.

What Can You Do To Help?

What we are going to need is for our readers to let our supporters know you really appreciate them supporting Carolina Arts. These are the folks who make it happen. Without their support there would be no Carolina Arts – in any form. You need to visit these supporters and tell them. You need to send them e-mails. You need to click any links we have to their sites. You just need to let them know in any way you can. It’s really important that they get that message. And, the folks who really have to do this is those who get coverage in Carolina Arts, but do not contribute financially in any way. They really better let our supporters know – their continued coverage depends on it.

I don’t know what else I can tell you, but we think the paper is going to look good, we’re going to have a lot of info in it, and we hope you’ll make a New Year’s Resolution to be a supporter and reader of Carolina Arts in 2011.

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This fact is no surprise to those who have known me throughout my visit to South Carolina. And, after 36 years, there are some who wish I would go back to Michigan – something I hope to do this year. It will be nice to visit a state that may be hurting more than South Carolina for once.

Well, what has gone on during the last year as far as Carolina Arts Unleashed goes? I have posted more entries this year including many press releases which missed our deadlines or which were so timely they needed instant exposure. I’m planning on starting a separate blog just for those instances – so that Carolina Arts Unleashed can get back to just commentary, exhibit reviews, and previews of upcoming events taking place in the Carolina visual art community – by me.

I tried leaving the “Comments On” switch for one of my entries about donating art to charity auctions – which drew a few comments from people who actually read my comments, but like I expected – most comments offered were disguised links to sites selling all kinds of things – many were flattering to me or the site in hopes I would leave them up. But, it turned out to just be more work for me in administering the blog. I don’t have time for that.

Like I’ve said from the start and in between – if you would like to make a comment about something I’ve said – send it in an e-mail to (info@carolinaarts.com) and I’ll post it on the blog – if you’re not a potty mouth and the comments pertain to what I’m talking about. I’ll even go so far as to say that if someone wanted to have access to our readers on a subject which pertains to the visual art community in the Carolinas – about a subject I haven’t hit on – be my guest. All reasonable requests will be considered – unless you’re just wanting to call me a loud-mouthed idiot. Remember – it’s my blog. If you’re just wanting to plug something or sell something – send in a press release like everyone else.

I’ve tried this year to use more logos and photos to break up all the words, so I hope my entries are more inviting and less daunting as people look at the length of some of the entries. But some things take a lot of words to get through. But, I’m not going to do that this time.

So, thanks to all you readers out there, I hope I post something you feel is worth reading in the future so that you really don’t feel like you’re wasting your life away at Carolina Arts Unleashed. And, don’t forget about Carolina Arts Online – our expanded web version of Carolina Arts – our printed paper.

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The Museum went through a major redesign for the recent blockbuster exhibit, Turner to Cézanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales, which attracted over 46,000 people to the Museum.

The day’s schedule is: at 10am – Ribbon Cutting and Opening Words from elected officials and executive director Karen Brosius; 10:30am – Passport to Art open studio drop-in for families; 11am – American Art lecture by Dr. Todd Herman, chief curator and curator of European Arts; noon – Gallery Talk: Highlights from the Collection (paintings) by Dr. Todd Herman; and at 1pm – Gallery Talk: Highlights from the Collection (decorative arts) by Brian Lang, associate curator of decorative arts.

Say, did you notice there is only 30 minutes between Opening Words by elected officials – good luck with that.

As an added bonus, photography and filming inside the Museum will also be permitted. You can’t do that everyday in a museum.

While you are there you can also check out the exhibitions: Cleve Gray: Man and Nature, featuring a 30-year retrospective of noted American painter Cleve Gray, on view through Sept. 27, 2009, and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg: 20th Century Masters in the Collection, on view through Oct. 4, 2009.

And, like most episodes of Déjà View, admission will be free again on Sunday July 19, 2009, from noon-5pm.

The re-installation of the galleries is made possible by a leadership gift from the City of Forest Acres, with additional funding provided by the Henry Luce Foundation. Lectures are part of the Humanities American Lecture Series sponsored by the Humanities Council of South Carolina.

And, as always, if you are traveling to Columbia from somewhere else, I would also recommend that you visit some of the commercial galleries in Columbia. You can find info about them in our SC Commercial Gallery listings on Carolina Arts Online.

And, in case you were wondering – Yes, the Museum is fully air-conditioned. That’s hours free of that Carolina sun.

The Columbia Museum of Art is located at 1515 Main Street in downtown Columbia, SC. For further information call 803/799-2810 or visit (www.columbiamuseum.org).

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Then there is our ART NEWS section. It carries all kinds of info about the visual arts. Here you can find out info about lectures being offered, dated call for enties for juried show, dated opportunities (for all kinds of things) and news about artists, art administrators, and arts organizations. We get this kind of info on a regular basis and we try to post it as soon as we can, but it does take a backseat to the printed paper. And, sometimes people don’t give us much time to let you know about things before the deadline is up.

We also receive info about art groups’ meetings, fundraisers, and tours.

I just wanted some of our blog readers to know a little bit more about what can be found on our website. Some of you may have known about this, but some may not have known. So, now you do.

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