Vellum LA: An interview with Sinziana Velicescu
Recently, I had the opportunity to talk to Sinziana Velicescu, the founder and director of Vellum LA which is an NFT art gallery at 7673 Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. During the interview, I asked her about the origins of Vellum and how she is using it to provide a platform for women and non-binary artists in the NFT space to express themselves through their art.
You can read more about the gallery and its upcoming events on the website here.
Your art gallery was displaying Emily Xi’s artwork on billboards. How did that happen?
Velicescu: Yes, she's one of the artists that we did a group show with. We had a partnership with Artsy and we had a big group show with all female and non-binary generative artists, and she was one of the artists that we had in that show. Then we did a billboard takeover with her last month.
What takeaways did you see while working with women and non-binary NFT artists?
Velicescu: It was an interesting process in general because there actually aren't that many women and non-binary artists working within the generative art space. So, it was kind of like, they all know each other. We pretty much almost covered all of them at the time, it wasn't every single one; but we realized how small this group of women and non-binary artists really was. We created that show in hopes of bringing more awareness to that.
Part of the proceeds went to Girls Who Code which is a nonprofit organization that is helping teach girls how to code. It's one of those things where, over the course of the entire show there were so many different artworks, so many artists, it was like a closely-knit community.
At the core of what the gallery values really is bringing awareness to something that's not the low-hanging fruit in the NFT space. We want to make sure that we're curating with diversity and inclusion in mind. We're going to continue to support other women, and also LGBTQIA, and also minorities in the space.
When you started this gallery, was that before the NFT bull run, or were you more like a traditional gallery before that?
Velicescu: My background as a curator is actually not so much within the traditional fine art world. I had been curating for almost 10 years with art on a large scale, like media installations.
That typically included a lot of digital artists, and included artists that had been in the traditional art space since as early as the 90s; some of which have now transitioned to the NFT space successfully as well.
They were sort of like the people that originated these concepts of generative art to begin with, but also, there was a lot of curation around photography and then also 3D art that was sort of never seen as being actual art.
Basically, I would say the combination of all of that was because I had been working with all of these different artists that I suddenly started to see doing really well in the NFT space. So, then the gallery itself was born in June 2021.
How did your partnership with SuperRare Begin?
Velicescu: SuperRare was put in touch with us because a friend of mine was working for the LA Art Show and he wanted the LA Art Show to be the first art show that featured NFTs.
He was basically looking for marketplace sponsors for the show that would be specifically interested in the art side of NFTs more so than the goofy degen stuff.
They introduced us to SuperRare and then we negotiated our terms on how this partnership could look and what we could do for each other. We've been doing quite a few shows together since.
Then with Opensea, was that sort of a similar thing that you were able to network into?
Velicescu: Well, so Opensea, it's funny because when we did our very first show at the LA Art Show, there were a lot of people in the space that came in to visit. One of them was Alexander from Opensea. We kept in touch and kept communicating different ideas and whatnot. They wanted to do something with us and it took a year to do something.
We have a show right now at the gallery by Jimmy Edgar, who's a conceptual digital artist and musician that we’re doing with Opensea.
He released a series of generated artworks called Objects and we're doing another billboard takeover around Los Angeles with that particular series. They're available at Opensea and we’ll be doing a Twitter space with them too.
When it comes to buying the artwork, how does that process go? Is it through fiat? Is it through crypto?
Velicescu: It really depends on the platform, but most of the platforms that we've partnered with have been strictly Eth-based platforms. We did one show on Tezos with Rarible, but most of them are Ethereum.
You can't purchase anything in fiat yet. We were interested in fiat as an option, but a lot of the sales happen online by messaging and emailing collectors. Some of these collectors have been in the gallery, some of them have not, and are watching things from afar, but those online relationships are just as important as the real-life relationships. We'll have collectors come into the space and then go back home to place a bid on the artwork.
Can you talk a little bit more about this marketplace?
Velicescu: It's meant to be an online platform for Vellum artists. It's not meant to be like an Opensea or even a SuperRare. It's really just a space where we can sort of have our own ownership of what is getting bought and sold. We want to have a hub with blogs about the artists, and then announce drops too.
We can also do essentially online exhibitions in tandem with the in-real-life exhibitions, and we can have guest curators, but it's really meant to start out to be small. Then we're probably going to expand from there.
