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Local artists learn to push art, themselves

	<p>Joy Javits (center) helps local artists in a workshop in The ArtsCenter in Carrboro. The event known as &#8220;Artists&#8217; Salon,&#8221; brings artists together in order to work on their art. Friday&#8217;s theme was &#8220;How to Present Your Art.&#8221;</p>
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Joy Javits (center) helps local artists in a workshop in The ArtsCenter in Carrboro. The event known as “Artists’ Salon,” brings artists together in order to work on their art. Friday’s theme was “How to Present Your Art.”

Emotions, stories and ideas can all be expressed through art, but once an artist finishes a piece, their work is never truly done.

With an eccentric audience ranging from painters to rappers, artists of all kinds took found themselves in the West Wing of The ArtsCenter in Carrboro in order to learn how to effectively communicate themselves alongside their projects.

Artists’ Salons are quarterly workshops sponsored by the Orange County Arts Commission. They host various speakers to teach artists about different aspects of the art world.

“We try to find a speaker or panel of several speakers who will talk about a subject that artists have suggested,” said Martha Shannon, director of the Orange County Arts Commission. “We try to respond to their interests.”

Friday’s speaker was Joy Javits, a former lecturer at UNC and founder of In the Public Eye: Effective Communication, a business that aims to teach successful communication habits.

Javits captured the full attention of the audience as she introduced the night’s topic, “How to Present Your Art.” She addressed a number of issues.

Javits went through how to make the first moments of meeting with a potential client or gallery owner count, pointing out that even the tone of a person’s voice act as initial means of exposure. She said that what people say, and even how someone says his or her name, matters.

“Be conscious about what you’re offering in those very first seconds to minutes,” Javits said.

The first seven seconds are when a person makes up their mind about someone else, she said.

“They’ve decided who you are, how elegant you are, how intelligent you are, possibly where you’re from, possibly something about how confident you are,” Javits said. “It is crazy that that’s true. The bad thing is that it’s often very difficult to change their minds after that happens.”

After Javits asked members of the audience shake hands with each other, she asked them to write a short “elevator speech,” a 30 second to two-minute speech explaining what is unique about their work.

“I wanted people to take away an elevator speech, so I got them thinking about how to talk about their art in a concise, concrete, interesting and intriguing way,” Javits said. “You do have to intrigue people to get them to look, usually.”

Javits also had three different artists from the audience present their work so that she could talk to them about the presentation of their art.

“(Javits) reiterated a lot that I know and she gelled it. Also she told me something that’s so hard for me—to make a talk concise,” said painter Emily Weinstein, one of the presenters from within the audience. “I’m really good at rattling on and that’s not what a stranger wants to hear.”

Artists’ Salons aim to provide valuable information to artists of all mediums and ages, Shannon said. The salon’s attendees are appreciative of the workshop.

“The salons are fabulous,” Weinstein said. “You feel cared about. It’s really nurturing.”

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