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Ask HN: How to reach tech figures who care about art?

by ForrestN on 11/14/23, 8:56 PM with 1 comments

  • by ForrestN on 11/14/23, 8:56 PM

    Longtime HN poster here, asking for your help on the eve of the 15th anniversary of my first project, which has since grown into a tiny non-profit organization. Our goal is simple: to organize, preserve, and make accessible the art history of our time via online archives of exhibition and performance documentation. We've collected nearly 700,000 images, documents and videos and archived them rigorously. They're all free to the public at contemporaryartlibrary.org. People who are doing research into contemporary art know us and use the website, and we're already the top resource for this kind of information by a mile. Our sites were used around 6 million times last year, and we're already above that for 2023.

    We have the rust and support of artists and art spaces and have access to a massive amount of incredible documentation. But we're too small to be able to do the work of gathering it, organizing it, uploading it, and then hunting for missing material. Our limiting factor is archivist hours, basically. So: we're trying to learn how to more properly fundraise despite not knowing many wealthy people directly. We're doing oru best within the art world, but it occurred to me that our idea board member/supporter is probably a young-ish tech person of means who understands the power of the internet as a means of providing access to knowledge and who likely has some pre-existing interest in contemporary art and would like to learn more about it.

    So: how does one network within the "tech world" to find people with a specific interest? How do I go about meeting people who might be in a position to help us (ie. routinely need tax deductions in substantial amounts) and are interested in contemporary art or artists generally?

    Any specific or process ideas would be gratefully appreciated! We're a 501c3 tax deductible non-profit based in California but providing our services to people around the world.