Northern Exposure
Art Sumo Connects the World through Unknown Artists
Despite not claiming to be an art connoisseur, Montreal engineer Naysawn Naderi has helped bring the world closer together through art, particularly through artists that have yet to make a name for themselves.
Founding Art Sumo back in May, Naderi promotes and sells artwork from up-and-coming artists in numerous countries around the world. Art Sumo started with a deal he once made with his mother.
“She bought me my first plane ticket, and both me and my brother basically had a deal [with her] that wherever we’d go, we’d always bring her back some form of art,” he says.
A graduate of McGill University in electrical engineering, Naderi has no art background himself, but calls himself a “big preacher of diversity.” He recalls one instance where he met with an artist during a trip to India a couple of years ago: the artist and his family specialized in creating depictions from the Hindu holy text, but their location in the North of India meant there was little access to a market for people to buy their art.
It was this, he says, that eventually helped lead to the birth of Art Sumo.
“What [the artist] would do each year [was] make paintings […] that he and his whole family would produce, and he would stockpile it to bring it to Delhi once a year and try to sell it to all the tourists that were there,” he says. “And there weren’t really that many tourists, but it was his one opportunity to sell his work.”
“I was thinking ‘This guy, he’s producing really great work, better work than I’m actually seeing in the first world, but I have no access to this guy. Nobody knows about him, even though he’s really talented.’ I just thought this was really unfair, and I thought that there should be some way to connect people who were producing this really great stuff and people who want to buy their work, [and] both could benefit in the process.”
Paintings on Art Sumo are usually sold between $150-$250, and come from artists from as far away as Ghana, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
This fall, Naderi went on his first trip to Ghana.
“I would show up in some of these markets and I’d just figure, okay, well I’ll see if I can go and find any artists,” he says.
“There were tons, and these guys were so desperate to sell their stuff that they’d follow me around the market. I’d be looking through stacks and stacks of paintings and then I’d have another 20 artists lined up outside who brought all their work. So I spent eight hours one day just looking at people’s paintings.”
Naderi says that one of the best parts of running Art Sumo is seeing “[the] little efforts you make eventually get some users, then eventually start making some sales,” he says. “You see the people actually start getting the paintings… and I get comments from people with framed paintings saying ‘I love this!’ It’s kind of a nice, encouraging cycle to be on.”
For more information on Art Sumo, go to artsumo.com.
