Useful tips for Exhibitors

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Latitudes is the largest online marketplace dedicated to art from Africa. Our team markets your work to a broad international network of buyers, from collectors to corporates, interior designers and trade professionals. We use email marketing, SEO, social media, advertising, custom order enquiries and other means to connect you with buyers. Here are some useful tips from our experienced team of web masters and curators on how to reap the rewards of your artwork listings.

RMB Latitudes Art Fair, 2023, photograph by Alexander Smith

Maximising your membership

The tools at your disposal

Latitudes Online features

At Latitudes, we believe the more you put in the more you get out. Our statistics show that the most active profiles receive the highest page views and enquiries. It is important to your success on the platform to regularly add new works and keep your page up to date. Recently uploaded works are reviewed for the following:

featured artworks in our weekly newsletter
featured artworks on our social media channels,
featured exhibitors on our homepage and
artwork selection for the artworks landing page

Within your membership plan, one of the best avenues for this is to engage with the Shows Feature. These are frequently featured in our newsletters and social media pages and are a powerful tool to maximise works listed on your profile.

If you are a gallery or organisation, we suggest working with your annual show calendar and uploading a selection of 10-20 artworks per show, along with any works from your inventory that could benefit by being displayed online. If you are an independent artist or curator, we suggest presenting a body of work in a similar fashion on our shows page or viewing rooms to draw more engagement to your listing.

Latitudes in-house projects

Additionally, Latitudes runs a series of in-house projects in which we source and rely on works readily available on our website. Most notably, our Art Agency works with interior designers, architectural firms and corporate spaces to procure art for their projects or offices. Up-to-date profiles also allow our team to include your works when we are working on art proposals, curated catalogues for top clients and Latitudes bespoke arts features.

E-commerce functionality

Making use of the e-commerce marketplace on our platform is another wonderful tool at your disposal. Buy Now allows collectors to purchase artworks immediately on Latitudes Online, using our e-commerce functionality. Buy Now is only possible for editioned artworks and unique works that are solely listed on Latitudes Online. We require works listed in Buy Now to be located in South Africa for shipping purposes.

It is important to note for exhibitors on a commission-free membership, that Buy Now sales incur a 10% commission charge to cover credit card fees and admin involved in the sale. Furthermore, the exhibitor is responsible for the price they upload and obliged to sell it at the most recently updated price when it sells online. All artworks submitted to Buy Now are subject to review by our team to ensure they fit into the above category.

RMB Latitudes Art Fair, 2023, photograph by Alexander Smith

Marketing and Promotion features

The Latitudes editorial team offers Exhibitor Spotlight features and Featured Shows in our weekly newsletters, which we offer on rotation and included in your membership plan. As with new shows, you are also welcome to notify us of any new artists added to the platform that we can look to feature them in a similar capacity.

In addition, Latitudes offers a series of additional promotions for galleries, exhibitions and artists; such as our Online Viewing Rooms, Blog Posts, dedicated social media posts and more. You are welcome to review our offerings and rates here. We are always happy to accommodate you and work within the budget you have in mind.

Including Latitudes on your website and social pages

We encourage you to include the Latitudes logo and links to your website, social media pages and general programming. This offers viewers as easy direct to your page and drives strong engagement and accessibility.

Uploading works

If you are spread thin but would value assistance with uploading works to Latitudes, we provide a service for uploading artworks at a rate of R50 per work.

Further Reading In Articles

Latitudes Podcast Featuring Stefan Simchowitz and David Altmann

Our guests on this episode are South African-born, U.S-based friends of more than 30 years: Stefan Simchowitz and David Altman. Their wide-ranging conversation explores everything from walking the line between collector and dealer, what success means in the art world and the promotion of cultural production from Africa.

As a platform for critical thinking, the Latitudes Podcast seeks to spark debate and provide our audience with a wide range of viewpoints from across the art ecosystem, even those that may ruffle feathers.

27 Sep 2023

Is abstraction the route to escaping geography and gender?

You have to resist the urge to neatly locate Nada Baraka’s art in an Egyptian context. The thirty-three-year-old artist was born in, lives and practices in Cairo, and indeed the sense of chaos that defines the compositions of her abstract paintings could represent the city's erosion of democratic values, political order and worsening social conditions.

20 Sep 2023

Latitudes Podcast featuring Cinga Samson

In this episode, painter Cinga Samson speaks about home, spirituality, his inspirations, and, in light of his meteoric rise in the art world, the meaning of success.

13 Sep 2023

Meet collector, patron & art enthusiast: Namita Singh Thakur

Latitudes sits down with collector Namita Singh Thakur, founder of Art Curio - a not-for-profit foundation that is deeply involved in collecting works of emerging artists, women artists and artists from underrepresented backgrounds.

06 Sep 2023

Latitudes Podcast featuring Mark Read

In this episode, Mark Read muses on a wide variety of subjects, from what palaeontology can teach us about art and humanity, to the role of galleries in a changing art ecosystem, and how the present is the most brilliant time to be alive in beautiful southern Africa.

30 Aug 2023

Fuzzy disciplines: Artistic collaboration in South African fashion design

While collaborations between artists and fashion, furniture or homeware designers are not uncommon in South Africa, there remains some confusion and even skepticism around the extent to which the disciplines of contemporary art and design can and should overlap.

23 Aug 2023

Latitudes Podcast featuring Sumayya Vally

In this episode, Sumayya Vally ruminates on topics such as the deep political power of beauty, how architecture affirms who we are in the world, and the often overlooked intelligence of early African architecture, which has the ability to connect us to each other, and to a higher power.

16 Aug 2023

Nobody Loves a Genius Child: Basquiat and the Anxiety of Autonomy

There is one artist whose works have remained divisive since they were unleashed onto the international stage in the early 1980s: Jean-Michel Basquiat.

02 Aug 2023

All That She Carried

All That She Carried is a large-scale exhibition in celebration of Women's Month. The show takes its name from Tiya Alicia Miles's New York Times bestseller, in which the historian "traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a testament to people who are left out of the archives."

02 Aug 2023

Tracing the threads of abstraction

One of the lesser explored aspects of textile art in African expression is an investigation into the use of abstraction. More precisely, what artistic, conceptual or ideological values textile art activate as opposed to, say, painting.

26 Jul 2023

Kalashnikovv Gallery presents solo show by Cameron Platter

Cameron Platter’s pencil drawings are meticulous enlargements of quick, impulsive marker drawings and collages. The artist then carefully plots and reworks-into these digitally, before painstakingly translating them into pencil on paper.

19 Jul 2023

Notes from a Curator's Journal

The art world has experienced a paradigm shift, with independent artists, disruptive curators, and marginalised individuals challenging established norms. However, reforms should be cautious of historical naivety and outdated practices.

19 Jul 2023

Latitudes Centre for the Arts

After the fantastic success of RMB Latitudes, our first physical event since 2019, Latitudes is excited to launch a second offline offering. Latitudes Centre for the Arts (LCA) is a physical, multi-purpose exhibition space in Johannesburg dedicated to the year-round promotion of artists and galleries on the continent.

05 Jul 2023

Curators at art fairs: disruptors or validators?

Curators were always going to be absorbed into the art fair fray. Nevertheless, it is difficult, if not impossible, to marry the curatorial act with commercial imperatives, given dealers need to make sales to recoup the costs of participating and staying in business.

05 Jul 2023