Digital Cover Story - Braydee Euliss

Indy-Based Curator on Mutualism, Disruption, and Reimaging the Gallery

Envision a world where art isn’t measured in sales, but rather valued through artist-centered relationships and support. Launched in the fall of 2021 by Braydee Euliss, COMPANION is an Indianapolis microcosm of this concept for visual artists. Euliss is the owner and director of the gallery, which is run out of the front room of her Midtown home.

With an extensive background in visual arts, curation, and work with nonprofits, Euliss developed her own space, making artist-centered mutualism the center point. COMPANION allows for art viewing, art buying, and presenting works to honor everyone’s time, strip away barriers to engaging with art, and create a harmonious relationship between artist and gallery. 

After receiving her degree in sculpture from Ball State University, Euliss worked as a curator in Muncie and ran the city’s arts council for a few years. Now an established member of Indy’s arts scene, she serves as the Indiana Arts Commission Region 5 Arts Partner and works collaboratively as a curator and thought partner on public and private projects of all sizes including The Park at 16 Tech, BUTTER Fine Art Fair, and 65/70 Riff.

Here, a past Pattern Creative Fellow, Cory Cathcart shares a recent conversation with Euliss ranging from her approach to exhibiting visual art to how COMPANION lends a hand to its occupants and the current relationships between artist and gallery in Indianapolis. 

Per usual, we’ve edited the transcript for clarity and brevity.

Cory Cathcart: What’s been inspiring you lately? 

Braydee Euliss: I’ve been inspired by people who are committed to either their personal art-making practice or their curatorial practice in anti-institutional ways—I have had some tough experiences with institutions. So many artists and creatives have, and I’ve been really encouraged and inspired by people who are operating outside of that usual channel to support artists and support communities of creative people through the resources and spaces available to them. I’m leaning more into trust and confidence in that direction. 

CC: How are you leaning more into that?

BE: I think it's important for people to be engaged in environments and relationships where the stakes are more equal. From working in a curatorial and art sales capacity, I know a lot of artists have a pretty bad taste in their mouths about commission-based exhibition opportunities. For whatever reason, artists haven't had fair, reciprocal relationships with most of the engagement opportunities available to them here.

CC: Tell me more about that. What does the current financial landscape look like for artists exhibiting work?

BE: Artists are expected to carry the financial responsibility of producing artwork for institutional exhibitions. In most cases, institutions feel entitled to a percentage of those sales because they are giving artists access to space—they work to build and bring in audiences, and they process the transactions. For the most part, if you're an artist and you’re invited to do a show somewhere, your institutional points of contact are getting paid. The institution has access to so many revenue streams.

The stakes are very different for artists. Risk management and incentives around sales are more heavily weighted on the artists’ side. They are crossing their fingers and hustling hard to bring people in to make sales because that’s how they can recoup their costs, maybe, if it's not a net zero or net negative experience. It's a real burden for most artists to carry.

CC: Where does mutualism come in? 

BE: The mutualism comes in because anybody who is an artist, or exists in the creative community, understands that it's a community. No one is creating their work or sharing it with the public in a truly individual way. You lean on the knowledge of other people, on relationships.

I'm much more interested in expanding those relationship circles and favoring strategies that feel mutual—where everyone is invested in the good of what's possible collectively. It's tricky. It's not always a structure that's super intuitive for people. It's easy for things to feel transactional when working or collaborating with other people. That was part of why it made sense to open the gallery and run COMPANION out of my home.

CC: Lately there has been some discord in the arts community regarding artists speaking out about local, mostly nonprofit, arts organizations. What can you say about that? Why do the organizations take the heat, rather than the funders or the government? Is there more to the story?

BE: Because that's the lowest-hanging fruit. It's easy to focus on because that's where so many of us feel the most friction. It’s the most immediate confrontation with how unhealthy the system is. As someone who has been the executive director of multiple nonprofits in the past, I am intimately aware of the precarity that I'm sure anyone running an arts organization probably feels in one way or another. 

In my experience, the biggest, sometimes insurmountable, hurdle is convincing a board that the labor artists and creatives contribute to an organization's programming and to the city at large is labor and that it deserves equitable compensation. Depending on the makeup of the board, that priority can be lost.

If you are bringing in money to support the creative economy, paying your employees, contract workers, and artists equitably is critical work. I'm sure mindset shifts at those power levels are happening in some ways, but for people on the ground doing this work, it doesn't feel like it's happening fast enough.

CC: So how does COMPANION come into play?

BE: One of the reasons I started COMPANION in my home was so that a board couldn’t tell me what to do, how to do it, who should be prioritized, or what deserves investment. These first three years have been fully self-funded. That comes back to the equitable stakes thing. I haven't been in a position to support artists through honorariums and personal production budgets in the past. I’m really invested in the trust and mutualism approach and believe if the artist is committed and making an investment, and I’m committed, the right people will show up.

I believe it’s possible to move slowly and with real intention through the curatorial and collaborative work with artists, and we’ll all see the return. Moving forward, COMPANION will be able to provide artist honorariums and production budgets—still prioritizing mutualism and equitable stakes but on a new level.

CC: What exhibitions and programming do you have planned for this year?

BE: The first exhibition of 2025 opens to the public on April 25 with Rebekah Nolan. She has written, illustrated, and self-published a children's book, and the exhibition is a visual, immersive exploration of the book’s theme. She’s collaborating with artists Landon Caldwell, Priya Wittman, Danielle Joy Graves, and Nick Witten to create the exhibition. It’s on view through June 1, with public events throughout. For full production exhibitions at COMPANION, we always do an opening reception, an artist dinner, and a closing reception. Rebekah's will include a reading of the children's book and a public conversation with all five artists. 

Then we have a group show planned. It’s the second iteration of a 2023 exhibition celebrating the summer solstice. It’s focused on materials and processes and will be at a special off-site location this year. With group exhibitions, I always prioritize including artists from outside of Indiana. The city has a lot of really well-intentioned commitment to local artists, but for our arts ecosystems and markets to thrive, we need thoughtfulness and investment in the import/export relationships. That's one strategy I'm excited to expand on in the future. 

And I’m excited to work with Julian Jamaal Jones again this year. I met him through my work with BUTTER, and have really appreciated his thoughtfulness, process, and the investments he makes in his work. We’re talking about smaller works on paper. Abstract drawing and sketching are at the foundation of his quilting practice. So presenting works on paper is a really lovely way to tell that story and help people understand all the layers behind his textile works.

CC: What does progress look like, as of now?

BE: There’s a resource called WAGE: Working Artists for the Greater Economy. It's a national effort to establish fair compensation rates for all kinds of creative work. I think creatives need to reassume a power position in their negotiations. That’s how we can affect change. The more people educate and advocate for themselves and for each other, the more the status quo will have to shift to accommodate those new standards. The more educated we get about what those fair compensation rates are, and the more diligent we are in our self-advocacy, that's where the power is to make progress. How it will play out… Who knows?

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This story was made possible thanks to the generous support of our friends at Life in Indy.