Education is Key
Using podcasts, videos and text articles, Medicine Man Gallery’s new website aims to inform.
In the film Miracle on 34th Street, the holiday store Santa Claus is chastised because he’s sending parents to other stores for the best toy deals. The store managers argue that he’s their Santa, not the competition’s. But Santa’s allegiances are to Christmas, not one particular store, he tells them.
After Mark Sublette unveiled a new version of Medicine Man Gallery’s website, this underlying message of Miracle on 34th Street was suggested to him. After all, Sublette was offering information on a wide range of subjects, and even promoting artists that he didn’t represent. He laughed. “Informed collectors benefit every gallery,” he said.
The website, www.medicinemangallery.com, does many of the things a gallery website should do, including presenting new works available for purchase, a show calendar and offering online purchasing options. But it also has vast sections related to Sublette’s Art Dealer Diaries podcast, Youtube videos about a variety of art subjects and even an online magazine, Essential West. It’s all there to educate collectors, whether they’re shopping at Medicine Man Gallery or not.
The website, which is now live, was designed and launched in late 2023 by Mark’s son, Charles Sublette, co-owner of the gallery with his parents. “We’ve always had a great website, but we wanted to make it better. It took about a year to rework, and we thought about every component. One of the things we wanted to do was make it artist-centric, so when collectors go to an artist’s page everything is right there, including biography, available art, videos and podcast episodes,” Charles says. “Everything is interconnected so it can promote all the different things we do across many platforms.”
Charles estimates his dad has more than 500 pieces of content, many of them videos featuring Mark talking to artists, or about specific kinds of art such as Navajo weavings and Native American silver and turquoise, or teaching people how to tell if a painting is a reproduction or not.
“It’s really about being storytelling for our collectors,” Charles adds. “The website is the portal into the gallery and right to our artists, as well as so much more.”