In 2018 Jack Smurthwite interviewed Madgalena Sawon – co-founder and director of New York's Postmaster gallery – for the economies edition of Sluice magazine. Postmasters have today (28 June 2022) announced they're being forced from their Tribeca location as a result of 'losing a protracted legal battle with our landlord over a Covid rent settlement'. The link to the announcement can be found at the bottom of this page. Below is the 2018 interview from our print magazine posted here online for the first time.

Jack Smurthwite: In April (2018), New York gallery Postmasters announced it had joined the online funding site Patreon. Online patrons can opt to donate anywhere from $3 – $500 a month to support Postermasters’ work. Did you consider any alternative funding mechanisms before settling for Patreon?

Magda Sawon:  Of course, everybody understands the situation in the mid-range and towards the bottom of the art world is pretty shitty. Obviously, we weren’t the only ones who are having economic issues. Our initial efforts were to increase our market outreach. And then, like many others, we did a couple of fairs that weren’t successful.
When these conventional elements did not pan out we started looking into a much more radical and more contemporary ‘balancing act’ of a solution. We settled on Patreon because of its community support and the larger number of people that [can support us who] don’t necessarily come to the gallery. I have such a strong desire to share, and the desire to teach, and the desire to show things that may not be familiar in order to enrich people’s experience. Patreon just seemed like something that needed trying. But nobody else was doing it.

Jack Smurthwite:  And people really responded.

Magda Sawon:  It got a lot of attention; some of it positive and some of it negative. It makes you realise how fossiled the art world is because a lot of people had no idea that this more contemporary model of crowdfunding even existed. People are very strongly set in their ways and how they perceive things.

Jack Smurthwite:  Patreon seems like the perfect platform for the way Postmasters functions. It is very community-focused and your rewards a very much based on communication and are, I would say, personal.

Magda Sawon: I’m not sure the rewards are completely personal but there are two issues that really drove the rewards. Firstly, we really wanted to avoid the model of giving people little things made by artists because that would enter a third type of economy where you start to manage little editions of postcards and buttons. Our rewards are not artist-dependent because I wanted the rewards to work for the artists, not feel like the artists were working for me. At the same time, the rewards engage with an issue that drives culture: a notion of experience. With the rewards, you can go behind the scenes and then, at certain levels, you go further and we can sit and do these “ask me anything” series of conversations with people that want to support us.

Jack Smurthwite:  You say you use Patreon as a ‘balance’ to keep you going. Is it nice to shift the balance over to the other end of your support network, to those that don’t have loads of money or a massive income to buy a hugely expensive artwork from you?

Magda Sawon:  We just want to bring these other people into play. I have just enormous interest in people coming to the gallery and seeing things. I am a huge proponent of physical gallery spaces and actual exhibitions and presenting artists in large self-context and letting them do a lot of what they would want to do that no format can even come close to, in my opinion. Art fairs don’t do that, the Internet doesn’t do that, selling platforms don’t do that. There is still something very substantial in the experience of art gives so going further with this idea of experience there is something that makes us want to survive it.
My goal is to have a little army of people who are invested in the gallery and pay $3 a month. That’s less than a coffee and it takes less than 3 minutes to sign up to Patreon.

Jack Smurthwite:  You’ve obviously been very resilient over the last 34 years with physical gallery moves and different gallery sizes. Do you see Patreon as comparable to a move in galleries or minimising overheads?

Magda Sawon:  It was probably seriously misguided ambition. If I have more space I can do more things. The gallery has big ambitions to deliver more culture and somehow create a financial model that balances that. Part of this model is Patreon - we’re hoping that a certain influx of funds from there will help us. Part of it is what happened from our announcement and maintenance of Patreon.
We have managed to get an enormous amount of critical attention and press through joining Patreon. What that did, in fact, was move the gallery out of the massive pile of invisible galleries and made it something more visible. It just goes to show that there can be a balance. Both Tamas and I are Eastern European, we both come from cultures where there are other modes of support for art. For us [working with different modes of support] is not necessarily nostalgic but it comes from the knowledge that there are other ways.
I work with a close friend of ours who is a graphic designer and has an amazing communication brand who runs a company called M-A-D. He helps us with a lot of our outreach efforts about our sustainability. The latest idea is that we have this slogan: ‘love art to death’, which Eric came up with. It’s just about entering something which has some power and stake in representing your idea.

Jack Smurthwite: With alternative funding models, like Patreon, available now, what would you do if you were to start Postmasters today?

Magda Sawon:  I guess the answer is: I don’t know. If I started Postmasters today and this was the only model I knew, the notion of challenging it verses the notion of trying to fit in have completely different proportions. I know through all of these years of joy, pleasure, struggle, and horror that we sustained our way through. We have the privilege of knowing that overcoming these challenges is possible.

Jack Smurthwite: And in some ways necessary.

Magda Sawon:  Completely necessary. Everything needs to change. I think art and this whole system is a moving target; it is changing. I am a huge proponent of utilising contemporary tools like Patreon.

Jack Smurthwite: How much of joining Patreon and aiming to get press was driven by making a public, international statement about how the art world – especially at your level – was flawed or failing galleries?

Magda Sawon: First of all it was driven by our survival and to generate assistance for us. But yes, the same time, the goals were bigger, to shake up the fundamentals. I didn’t know what to expect and I didn’t plan this with any kind of pr explosion in mind. It seems it was a useful kind of brain scratch and it showed that there is another way. We’ve tried a lot of different things over the years. With 6 other galleries we organised a thing called seven, which was a diy fair in Miami. During Basel for three or four years there were seven founding galleries that would rent a 20,000 square foot warehouse. And you had a flip of the model where the economics of it where exactly the same as paying an art fair but instead of having a booth I could bring a truck of art and have the equivalent of a gallery space to show it. It was a space between an art fair and a pop-up. Something that continues to be happening is the cooperation and collaboration between galleries. You always have to in some ways be in communication with your peers.

Jack Smurthwite:  Have any galleries you hadn’t heard of before got in contact with you about your sustainability through Patreon?

Magda Sawon:  No, a lot of people are very unwilling to say that they’re doing poorly. Everybody says they’re always doing great and there is just not a mathematical possibility that that’s true. If you look at the math of fairs, of how many galleries, and how much art there is, how much is being sold, etc it just can’t work. This might be another gesture that jolted people by us using Patreon. It might be another reason why people don’t want to follow because they don’t want to admit they aren’t doing well. I just can’t pretend that things are always going phenomenally when sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.  

Postmasters Gallery was founded by Magda Sawon and Tamas Banovich in New York's East Village in December 1984.
In 1989, the gallery moved to Soho and relocated again to Chelsea in September 1998. In October 2013, the gallery opened its new spectacular 6,500 square-foot space on 54 Franklin Street in Tribeca.

During its 38 years, Postmasters has represented and exhibited young and established artists who work across a range of mediums including painting, sculpture, video, digital, installation, photography and NFTs. Postmasters actively seeks new forms of creative expression and exhibits them in the context of traditional and nontraditional formats alike. The artworks are largely content oriented, conceptually based and, most importantly, reflective of our time.

Postmasters

Link to Postmasters announcement

Support Postmasters here

 This article features in the Spring 2018 edition of Sluice_magazine