Local Easel Brings Fort Collins Art Community Together

Take a walk through Old Town and you will see that local art is the life of Fort Collins, from the colorfully-painted pianos to the new art galleries around town. However, most people today look for information online; and with so many corporate search engines, websites and directories, the local perspective has minimal presence and representation.

“A lot of the sites come from a top-down model,” said Jenni Pedersen, co-founder of Local Easel, a local art search engine. “For example, a corporate website can be stationed in Seattle, and then decide to come into a city, claiming it knows it well just because it can find 50 percent of the city’s information. But you can’t find the holes in the walls, the locals’ perspective, the true valuable content.”

A “Cutting Edge” Solution

Local Easel LLC was created as a response to this problem. A subsidiary of Aspenware Internet Solutions, Inc., Local Easel was founded in November 2011 by Jenni Pedersen and her father Richard Pedersen, who is also the founder of Aspenware.

Jenni Pedersen described Local Easel as “cutting edge” due to its ability to be part of the local community and get the locals’ perspective – information that is compiled into a comprehensive search engine that a global site such as Google, Foursquare or TripAdvisor isn’t able to grasp because they don’t have the focus of one niche, said Pedersen.

Local Easel co-founder Jenni Pedersen shows the search engine site at the company's launch party on Feb. 3. 
Photo by Richard Pedersen.

Using grassroots marketing techniques, Local Easel seeks to achieve 100 percent coverage of local art in Fort Collins. The organic dimension Local Easel has allows it to bridge the gap and unite each artist and art gallery on an equal playing field, giving every artist and gallery the chance to be represented the way they want to be represented, said Pedersen.

Local Easel’s strategy is to go into the community from the ground level – engaging with it, building trust and learning the locals’ perspective from the locals themselves. After gaining an understanding of the art community, Local Easel is then able to accurately represent the local art community, said Pedersen.

“One of the greatest things about Local Easel is through its individual profiles and collections for artists,” said Coleen Cosner, owner of Coco Artist Studio. “It helps to put a name to the face and the art. I feel that so many times conversations play out along the lines of, ‘Oh, I think I know that artist but have never met them. I know the name but not the face. I saw a great piece but not sure who the artist is, etcetera.’”

A Thriving Art Community

While many local artists and art galleries already have web presence, Local Easel’s goal is to become a hub and resource for those websites and the art represented by them. The ultimate vision is to get the local community to artists’ and galleries’ sites, increase search engine results, engage local art patrons and turn Fort Collins into a thriving art community and art destination, said Pedersen.

“[Local Easel’s] direct involvement is wonderful for us,” said Daniel Ibanez, an artist and educator working with Rendition Gallery. “They’re going to kind of plaster their page with information about our artists – some young, some old, some established, some not so established – and ultimately do the work of getting the word out so that the creative curious can be here and know about what’s going on.”

The sign out front Local Easel's launch party on Feb. 3. The launch party was hosted by Opiate Gallery. 
Photo by Jenni Pedersen.

 Many of the artists in Fort Collins don’t participate in the same social networks, and as a result some artists live next door to each other and aren’t aware of it. There hasn’t been a strong network of local artists, and Local Easel seeks to change that. By creating an easy-to-use platform with a very accessible navigation system, Local Easel facilitates the communication that needs to happen on a daily basis between artists, said Ibanez.

“Local Easel is helping to bring the community of artists together,” Cosner said. “The community seems to be more intimate through this new project.”

In the future, Local Easel hopes to work with local art communities in other cities such as San Francisco, Seattle and Charleston.