Avidly used by the creative community, Instagram was a powerful social network to employ for Friend of a Friend Gallery, a project space I co-directed from 2021 to 2022. When making our exhibition announcements on Instagram for the exhibition Schools Out in July of 2021 we wanted to both highlight a central thematic work and also pay tribute to the more than 28 other artists who were participating.
The exhibition was a big summer group show we named after the building our space was in, a former elementary school in downtown Denver. Since the exhibition showcased so many artists, we wanted to find a way to make them feel included and to bring their names to the attention of our increasing number of followers. Many of the featured artists were emerging, so publicity was especially important to them. My co-director wanted to find a way to list the names of all the artists involved at the time of the press release.
Though the use of text, especially large amounts of text is generally frowned upon in social media posts, I understood why an exception might be made and came up with a solution.
For the first exhibition announcement on Instagram, I created a carousel post that pulled scrollers in with a work by featured artist Robert L Martin, who had created several hyper-realist drawings of old books. The selection of this artwork was complimentary to the exhibition title, and also highlighted their technical prowess.
The first image in the post was a solo shot of Sarah Jayne from “Family Portrait” series, 2019, depicted below. In the second image, I used the frame from Sarah Jayne, and used photoshop to insert a list of the featured artist in place of the artwork. The resulting post generated a lot of engagement with both our audience and the featured artists, many of whom re-posted and shared the image with their names listed with their own followers.
