About this website

This website, run by Alonso del Arte, is based on an idea Emma Lock­ridge had for a website, potentially to be called "Gate­keeper De­troit" to list all those Detroit art­ists ignored by New York reporters.

Now, even if this website was limited to art­ists in Detroit, it would still be a massive un­der­tak­ing. The goal is eventually to have a page about every artist in Michigan, with two work samples (preferably but not nec­es­sar­i­ly recent) and a portrait done by an­oth­er artist (the reason for this is to pro­vide another opportunity to link another art­ist's profile).

Of course that requires obtaining the proper permissions. In some cases, especially that of newsworthy artists, we'll settle for a text-only page with information culled from pub­lic announcements (such as gallery fliers) and news publications.

If you would like to help this website with in­for­ma­tion (names of up-and-coming art­ists, links to critics' reviews, etc.), please e-mail Alonso: alonso dot delarte at gmail dot com. Be sure to include "Artists of Mich­i­gan web­site" in the subject line so your mes­sage doesn't wind up in a spam folder.

Information for artists wishing to be listed

To qualify to be listed on this website, you have to be an artist living and/or working in Michigan, or you have lived and/or worked in Michigan in the past, and you have formally exhibited in at least three art galleries (not necessarily in Michigan, but this requirement may be relaxed for sculptors and muralists).

Also, there is the expectation that your artist name is similar if not ex­act­ly the same as your legal name. For example, if Josephine Smith is a Mich­i­gan artist who exhibits her paintings as "Joey Smith", I'd have no problem with having a page for her under that name.

But if instead she goes by something eccentric like "Altitude 7 Marker", then no. Not that I actually verify this other than by looking it up with Google. So if your artist name is not too obviously eccentric, I might take it on faith that it's not too different from your legal name.

I guess that's why there's no page on this site for "Kasparov the Damaged Boat" or whatever he goes by. Also I reserve the right to arbitrarily exclude anyone for no logical reason.

Though if you're a qualifying artist with no listing on this site, most likely it's because I just haven't gotten around to you yet.

The best way to help me get around to you would be to send me a couple of work samples and some information about you (such as recent past ex­hib­its, with precise dates, and new exhibits coming up soon).

The more information the better; detailed dates are very helpful and ap­pre­ci­ated. I prefer to have to leave stuff out than have to play detective to figure out some small detail.

However, I don't have much use for artist statements, and wouldn't care too much if you don't send me yours.

Work samples are also greatly appreciated. Preferably you provide them as JPEGs of medium resolution, which I then downsample to low res­o­lu­tion.

About HTTPS for this website

When I started this website, I thought I did not need HTTPS be­cause there would be no private information (like passwords or credit card numbers) on it.

But then I was reading about how hackers can intercept HTTP content and modify it for their nefarious purposes. At first I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to do that to this website.

Later on it occurred to me that maybe a hacker would want to insert links to malware on these pages. It's a crime of opportunity more than anything else. A hacker wouldn't care if this was the website for an orphanage.

If a hacker modified the content of this website, for whatever pur­pose, I would find it to be unacceptable. I want to be able to stand behind every word you read on this site. Also, I want you to be confident that I looked at every external link at the time I put it on this site.

I made the switch to HTTPS on April 3, 2018. As a consequence of this change, your browser may have lost track of which pages you've visited prior to that date.

It looks like the monetary cost will be just a few cents. The more important cost of making the switch to HTTPS was time. In hindsight, the technical difficulties were not terribly bad, but certainly annoying.

Thanks to a 1-year free trial for hosting (which ended May 2016), expenses for this website were minimal in the beginning and hardly worth mentioning. The increase since then has been small. But the domain name renewal fees do feel like a lot.

If you would like to donate to help keep this website running, you can donate through PayPal. Note that these donations are not tax deductible. (Button below will take you to PayPal.com).

This website is something like 99% "hand-coded." I mostly use Notepad to write these pages, though I do help myself to widgets every now and then.

However, in March 2018 I started using Adobe Brackets, though I still use Notepad from time to time to make quick changes.