Dangling from light posts along Denver’s Speer Boulevard, Chicago’s Michigan Avenue and countless other main drags in major cities across the country, art-exhibit banners often provide just a peek, one detail, the slightest sliver of an artistic masterpiece.
Until recently, only people who work at museums had access to these banners. “I used to work at the Art Institute of Chicago, and I would always ask for a banner after a show closed,” says Nora Weiser. “For the last 10 years, we’ve always had one hanging in our home.”
Everyone loved them, but no one could buy them. “It just didn’t make any sense,” she says.
So, 18 months ago, Weiser and her husband, Nicolas Weiser, founded BetterWall, a Denver company that collects used art-exhibit banners from museums across the country and sells them to regular folks. It combines her insights into the art world with his environmental experience.
“Banners just get thrown away,” Weiser says. “As you can imagine, they are reproductions of major works of art from around the world, so there are a lot of rights associated with that. Museums get permission to use that image on a banner for a short time, say June to August to promote the exhibit, then at that point they have to be destroyed.”
Securing the rights to keep banners whole for sale is “quite an undertaking,” Weiser says of her contact with living artists, the estates of dead ones as well as museums and private collectors around the world. The banners are then cleaned, warehoused, advertised online (betterwall.com), sold and shipped to buyers.
“It’s a lot of work,” she says. “That’s why museums don’t do it themselves.”
The company sends damaged banners and those not secured for sale to a recycler. Each year, some 10 tons of vinyl gets frozen, ground up and turned into pellets that become vinyl flooring, like the spongy, colorful matting used in health clubs and on playgrounds.
The Denver Art Museum recently joined BetterWall’s list of collaborators. The relationship is similar to one between a gallery and an artist, with each getting a percentage of the sale price.
“Our biggest problem,” says Janet Meredith, director of marketing at the Denver Art Museum, “is that we are not really set up to sell these banners. Sometimes people would call us, and we sold quite a few that way, but we hadn’t gone about it in a proactive way. BetterWall contacted us, and we thought, ‘Great, what a wonderful solution.”‘
Strictly vertical, the vinyl banners range from 2 1/2 to 3 feet wide and 6 to 8 feet long, depending on the city where they first hung. San Francisco, for example, requires light-pole banners to be 3 feet by 6 feet, while Chicago wants narrower and longer banners.
Created in limited quantities – sometimes 20, sometimes two – the banners mostly sell for $300 to $800. Each is numbered and comes with a certificate of authenticity, hanging hardware and free shipping.
The banners fit into the trend toward urban chic. “It’s a kind of warm modernism,” says Weiser. “People are really filling their floor space, but a lot of the wall space is left empty because they can’t find what they want.”
Printed on both sides, the banners work well in large, loft-like spaces as room dividers. The colorful, dramatic images also perk up normal-
scale living room and office walls. Meredith, who has a few at home and eight lined up on her office wall, has also seen people hang the banners in their ultra-clean garages or unfinished basements.
“So much is being mass produced. Everyone has the same chair or the same table. These banners are just really dramatic, really beautiful, and they have a story attached to them,” says Weiser.
“Maybe it’s just the exhibit, or the artist, or the person used to live in that city. People are looking for that uniqueness because so much has become ubiquitous.”
