For Artists: Building Your Collector Circle

Berlin-based art curator and educator Jenia Yanes invites emerging and mid-career artists to two transformative workshops designed for the realities of the 2026 art world.

Kunstraum Heartspace is pleased to invite you to the next pair of workshops with curator Jenia Yanes. This new series is dedicated to the external architecture of an artistic practice: the first workshop focuses on collector circles and long-term relationships, the second on image, reputation, audience, and public communication.

A practical workshop on collector psychology, identifying and approaching your potential collectors, and building a long-term collector circle around your work using professional strategies adapted from galleries and dealers, so you can hold far more control over your career and sales.

Most artists have no real understanding of who their collector could be, how to recognise that person, where to find them, how to approach them, or how long-term relationships around an artwork are actually built. Sales happen randomly, through acquaintances, occasional commissions, or vague luck, while the artist remains dependent on accident and has very little real control over the professional and financial side of the practice.

We will speak about different types of collectors, how to understand who your work is actually for, how to stop treating “the collector” as an abstract fantasy, how to begin forming a real circle of people around your work, how artists can use open studios, personal invitations, conversation, follow-up, and targeted relationship-building more intelligently, and how sales at a higher level are built through trust, context, and long-term human contact. 

This workshop is for artists who:

• want to understand how collector relationships are actually built instead of relying on random sales or chance encounters;

• want to have more control over the commercial side of their practice instead of depending entirely on intermediaries;

• feel that their work could resonate with the right people, but have no clear system for identifying, approaching, and building relationships with them;

• want a more concrete and professional understanding of how sales happen around serious artistic work.

How to shape your online presence and communication so they support your artistic growth, attract the right audience, and build the right kind of attention around your work.

This workshop is about building a stronger identity around an artistic practice: audience, reputation, communication, symbolic consistency, public opportunities, and long-term trajectory.

We will speak about artistic archetype, visual self-presentation, tone of voice, interviews, thematic coherence, audience relationship, PR logic, collaborations, invitations, publications, and the process by which an artist becomes recognisable and needed not only through the work itself, but through a stronger position around it. And of course, we will speak in much greater detail about how all of this can be applied through social media.

The goal is to build the kind of presence that strengthens your artistic trajectory, grows the right audience around your work, and helps you build a reputation that supports both independent and institutional paths of development.

This workshop is for artists who:

• want to understand how image, communication, reputation, and social media work together, and how to use Instagram as part of a serious long-term strategy rather than as random content production;

• want to grow independently without weakening future institutional possibilities, and want to become more legible, memorable, and strategically coherent in public space;

• want to integrate elements of producing and PR strategy into their practice in a way that is adapted to the realities of the art world.