TheArtBlog, Philadelphia’s go-to site for local arts, to shut down after 22 years

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After 22 years of covering every nook and cranny of Philadelphia’s gallery scene, TheArtBlog.org is closing down.

Co-founder and Executive Director Roberta Fallon said the blog, one of the most reliable and regular outlets about the local art scene, will end in June.

“I’ve had enough of the administration of ArtBlog. It’s a heavy lift doing the grant writing and the fundraising in addition to the publication, which I totally love and adore,” Fallon said. “Doing the podcast is a joy and working with the writers is a joy. The administration is not quite a joy. So I’m ready to say enough is enough.”

WHYY contributed to the production of TheArtBlog’s podcast in its early stages, and invited TheArtBlog into its News and Information Community Exchange, or N.I.C.E., cohort of grassroots news content creators.

Fallon could not say precisely how many visitors her site has – she finds online data analytics “spongy.” Rather, she counts the 4,600 people who subscribe to the ArtBlog newsletter as her primary audience.

“With very little unsubscribing and a lot of clicks and opens,” she said. “It’s small numbers but it’s plateaued at that level for years.”

Though small, TheArtBlog has had an outsized impact. Word of its closure rippled across the Philadelphia art community.

“Over the years it grew into an essential online platform for staying informed about Philadelphia’s art scene and the artists who shape it,” said Chrstine Pfister, who has run the Pentimenti gallery in Old City for 33 years.

“With its absence, Philadelphia loses a vital resource,” she said. “There is no other platform that brings together this kind of vital, community-focused information in Philadelphia.”

The end of TheArtBlog comes at a particularly tentative time for the arts, as it’s on the heels of the sudden closure of the University of the Arts last year and the threatened elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts from the federal budget this year.

Sara McCorriston is steeling herself for compounded losses. The alumnus of UArts co-founded Old City’s Paradigm gallery 15 years ago. In that time it has been mentioned in TheArtBlog roughly 50 times, which she says contributed to its success.

“ArtBlog has stood out throughout its entire time as really vibrant and vital to the Philadelphia art scene. We’ve been very lucky to have it,” she said. “Right now has been a moment of preparing ourselves for loss in general.”

Fallon started the blog with her creative partner Libby Rosof in 2003 when they saw that arts coverage was disappearing from mainstream news media.

Together they devoted themselves to exploring Philadelphia’s undersung artists and emerging collective spaces. Countless artists and writers got their first exposure in TheArtBlog.

“We’ve always been criticized as being cheerleaders instead of critics,” Fallon said. “Our comeback to that was always that the community we wanted to cover was not the art museums particularly — although we have covered them — it was the alternative galleries, the performance art, the experimental things. We didn’t want to bash them. We felt it was a nascent community that needed to be uplifted.”

Rosof retired from the project in 2014 and now Fallon, 76, is following suit. But in her two decades running the blog, Fallon never accepted a salary. Whoever replaced her would likely expect to be paid.

ArtBlog has an annual budget approaching $90,000, with which it pays its half-time managing editor Ryan deRoche and all of its contributing writers. Board member Tim McFarlane said adding an executive salary would require TheArtBlog to more than double its budget, which the board does not see as a fiscal possibility.

“We went through plenty of meetings where we talked about possibilities, but it all wound up coming down to the fact that the ArtBlog would get absorbed into another entity,” he said. “We feel like it would either be diminished or turned into something unrecognizable.”

The chief concern now is taking care of 22 years of art documentation. Many times, the coverage given to a Philadelphia art event by TheArtBlog was the only coverage it got. Fallon and the board are seeking an institutional partner who will keep the thousands of articles, reviews, photos and interviews intact and accessible.

“So many exhibitions and events in the art world are brief. The coverage is what keeps them alive for years to come,” McCorriston said. “We want all those links to be live on everyone’s websites that prove something happened.”

Fallon, with her board, decided to close the project when it still had enough energy and funding to wind itself down with dignity.

“I am relieved that we’re closing because I have other things I want to do,” she said. “My children are grown now, but they don’t know about how I grew up. I have stories to tell, and I would like to get back in the studio. I would like to write those stories. I would like to illustrate those stories. I have grandchildren that I like to see on a regular basis.”

“ArtBlog is a fantastic project,” she said. “Like a lot of projects, it just ran its course.”