Divina’s intervention
ATTY. DIVINA GRACIA PEDRON Owner The Good Art Gallery Topflight lawyer Divina Gracia Pedron takes up the cudgels for promising artists by opening a ‘small but credible’ art gallery
I’ve been a lawyer for 20 years; wala akong alam sa business, and I was a proud person. You wouldn’t catch me selling anything to anyone.”
DIVINA Gracia Pedron’s day job as a topflight lawyer is to fight for and defend intellectual property rights.
As senior partner of the famed Cruz, Marcelo & Tenefrancia, she takes care of the firm’s intellectual property (IP) and family law matters. Recognized internationally as an IP expert, Pedron has extensive experience in brand protection, trademarks and copyright enforcement and litigation. Her profile on the firm’s website says “she also works with trademark owners in domain name disputes and advises clients on issues involving their trademark rights.”
On her “personal time,” she still “fights” for other people — in an artsy way.
Pedron owns The Good Art Gallery in Quezon City whose mission is to serve as a platform for promising artists to get noticed by the elite set.
Established as a family business, the art gallery’s first human resources were her cousins.
“We started brainstorming. What did we know,” she said as she looked back on the first steps she took in putting up the art house.
“I’ve been a lawyer for 20 years; wala akong alam sa business,” she said.
“And I was a proud person. You wouldn’t catch me selling anything to anyone.”
Three years on, The Good Art Gallery is breaking another wall by expanding its exhibit space at Pwesto Community Mall, a wayside commercial discovery along Holy Spirit Drive in Diliman.
Pedron’s cousins have stayed by her side, taking care of day-to-day tasks in the gallery while their cousin-boss attends to her duties with the firm and as a lecturer at the University of the Philippines College of Law.
“Ours is an extended family that’s very close,” she said. “Since it was family, I knew I was going to be a fair — a better than fair employer.”
Like many gallery owners, Pedron started as a collector. She’s been collecting artworks for six years prior to the gallery’s opening.
‘Why not sell art?’
As president of the UP Portia Sorority, Pedron organized fundraisers where pre-loved items that included artworks were auctioned off. In one event, they managed to raise P1.5 million in a fundraiser that the sorority held for the benefit of the survivors of Super Typhoon “Yolanda.”
“Since that exposure to selling, I started feeling na kaya ko ‘to. I can do this,” she said.
“My mom and I spoke, and I think we both thought about it at the same time. I said, why don’t we sell art? Because ‘yun ang alam ko. And I knew there was a market for it.”
No moment was lost as she instructed her cousins to scout for a place which they could put up in the art gallery.
Find a space they did, and it was just right within their neighborhood.
“Because this was going to be a family affair, I wanted [a place] I could run to, whether bumagyo, magka-earthquake. And if this fails, I thought, I could just quietly close down.
“Ayoko nang magpaka-bida! I had all of those doubts. Would people buy? Will I last a year? Am I going to survive? Why would they buy from me?”
She matched the trepidation with verve, crossexamining herself even as her project rose before her.
“We did everything in a rush.” Two months to opening day, she was still hung up about not conducting a market study.
But composure reigned over expectation. Her cousins were gainfully employed; they had a surge of pride in what they were doing and were edified by their boss’ instructions to “measure the canvas, not the frame” or to watch art appreciation videos daily.
Pedron has remained true to The Good Art Gallery’s ethos that every piece of art is good.
“It’s really subjective,” she said as she narrates her experience of having sold pieces that she would not have bought for her personal collection.
The market taught her better than to write off any piece of art that was not immediately to her liking.
The humble scale of the business model also reflected the type of artists the gallery supports.
“These are emerging artists who could still price their works affordably,” she said. “Hindi ‘yung may expectation na kapag nakabenta sila ng isa, gusto nila mag-rest sila and won’t paint for another month.”
She understood that some do art as their bread and butter, but she has met passionate hobbyists who channel their revenue back to buying art materials.
“If it’s really good, I really buy it. The artists approach us, and we hardly approach any. We’ve become accessible through social media, too, of course. There are artists asking to join, and they have questions like ‘how much do we pay you?’”
Outright transactional talk initially shocked her. “Nagugulat ako sa tanong na ‘yun. I tell them, we are going to feature you, and you don’t have to pay us, but at the same time, the relationship must be respected.”
By that, she refuses to be party to the weird price differences in the market for the same pieces that have once been featured on The Good Art’s social media assets. These are usually driven by gallery shopping.
“There are some, after we’ve featured their work, they would withdraw it as soon as it was posted and sell to other galleries for a higher price,” she observed.
To discourage this unscrupulous practice, The Good Art Gallery has made it a policy to keep and display artworks for at least two weeks or until it gets sold.
Artistic justice
“If I post it [on social media], it means I believe in it; it’s something I support, and I would buy it myself,” she declared. The same openness is not assumed for everyone, not even every art collector.
The gallery and herself as collector bottled up the “unspoken pressure to sell” in order to “give people space,” she said.
Perhaps this was the power in the gallery’s size — it does not feel the need for glitzy, promotional window dressing.
Pedron shuns bandwagon gimmicks such as doing text blasts, sending promotional emails and hyped up vernissage.
“I don’t like it when people do that,” she said as she emphasized that they just simply post a photograph of the artwork on the gallery’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Take away traditional marketing trimmings, and there would just be the inherent goodness in the artworks themselves — and the art appreciation of social media followers and collectors. Starting artists need not slot themselves into the packed lineup of the big galleries.
The Good Art Gallery has survived for more than a year that Pedron has bargained for.
She said the gallery has grown beyond expectations. Its social responsibility has extended to fundraisers for pandemic and disaster relief efforts.
Its growing collection has prompted them to expand its display space by renting the adjacent space in Pwesto Community Mall.
Yet, the desire to become a big-name gallery is not on Pedron’s radar.
“I’d just love to have more parking space for my guests,” she said.