A family affair

Maria is an artist. She is also the proud mama of Vera (5 y.o.), CanvasCanvas (5 y.o.) and Artclever (2 y.o.). After her education in architecture, she joined the very exclusive Institute of Contemporary Art Practices of Joseph Buckstein: a group of 30 students, studying for a year in Ilya Kabakov’s studio, almost for free.

While developing her artistic career in contemporary painting and installation, she met her husband-to-be in a protestant church. An artist as well, he was a fierce multi-tasker. At that time, he combined a career in marketing with gallery and restaurant management.

The two love birds travelled a lot. It is while travelling, both times in the States, that they had their “wow” moments and decided to embark on the journey of entrepreneurship with CanvasCanvas first, and Arclever then.

Few years later, they are still partners, both in life and work.

Think out of the frame

If you ever tried to have an idea good enough to develop a business from it, you know it may play hide and seek for quite some time. And the “wow moment”, described in a lot of success stories, may never happen. But as in most American movies, there is a happy ending, or rather a happy beginning. While travelling in the States, our two artists went strolling around different museums and art galleries. What struck them, besides amazing art, was the size of the frames. In art places, as well as in the shops, one could find ready made frames in dimensions that were not available in Russia.

Back in their motherland, they started investigating, as a side project for themselves and their friends. Today, CanvasCanvas is the one and only canvas service in Moscow, works with international companies for logistic or renovation, provides over 1500 artists and institutions all over the world. Among them stand Philip Colbert, Valeriy Koshlyakov, Alexandra Paperno, Ira Bordo, Nikolay Koshelev, Vika Koshelev, Dunya Zakharova, Chtak, Eliaj Fedotov-Fedorov, Protey Temen, Yulia Iosilzon etc; as well as museums and galleries such as the Multimedia Art Museum, Art 4 Museum, Osnova Gallery, AnnaNova Gallery, Moscow Historic Museum etc.

The company was sustainable after one year, not only because it addressed a need, but also because of its authenticity. Indeed, Maria and Daniel are working with several masters they developed a privileged relation with, mostly located in the Moscow area. They call on them according to the sizes requested. This chain of trust is maintained from A to Z because every order is delivered personally by Daniel, to have direct feedback and a warm relationship with their customers. In order to highlight their community, Maria has been doing 10 questions interviews with contemporary painters for all 5 years.

Art education for all !

This personal connection is also at the origin of the creation of Artclever, Maria’s second company. At 15, as her family did not get the money for it, Maria went to the Ministry of education to ask for free education. And was successful. Deeply rooted in her is the belief that everyone should have access to education, no matter how rich you are or where you live.

While travelling in the US once more, they decided to create Artclever with one mission: make good education affordable and attractive for people who don’t have access to it. With this project, teenage Maria is taking control over the education system and doing her best to improve it.

That for, Artclever is a ready to use solution for any institution to provide their educational content. Based on a B2B2C model, it develops online programs of remote education for schools, universities and companies, especially about art. Besides the online platform, the team — about 7 people based in Russia, Ukraine and the US — is also producing the content (mainly videos). After just two years, the company has partners in Russia, the US, Spain, France, works with great clients such as Universal University, Houzz or IKEA and gather a community of more than 15K studied users. Knowing that only 3% of Art & Design Schools in the world provide online programs because they simply don’t have enough resources to run it, the opportunities are endless.

Artclever also provides grants for users with disabilities or special needs. During her researches, Maria found out that each 20% of the US, Canada and OECD countries population have some mental illness (mostly depression), mostly due to cultural isolation (over 260 millions people live outside their homelands). In this context, Artclever also wants to be a multicultural community for those who need to be involved in their own culture and social communications.

Actually, to make creative industries more accessible to all, regardless of what we speak, the team’s new challenge is to develop a software that would instantly translate any content in 17 languages. Didn’t we all dream that communication was not a barrier anymore?

“I would like to win this fight against the language barrier. As technologies are very fast, I am not worried that we will provide any relevant form of education. VR in architecture and interior design for example”.

Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman/Entrepreneur/Artist

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As you can imagine, in the turmoil of a multi-tasking entrepreneur and mother’s life, Maria does not always have a good night sleep, or much time for her art. But it is inspiring to observe the lessons she draws out of it.

Inertia is a reality of business development. Push as hard as you can and the ball will eventually get rolling.
Build on your strengths and don’t listen to what they say. Indeed, working with your husband can lead to a bankruptcy and/or divorce. Hopefully, Maria and Daniel seem past that and built their partnership on complementarity: he’s COO, she is art & content director, and still they take any important decision together.
Surpass your limits and try new things. In May 2019, Artclever won the pitch contest at the SVOD conference. Pitching for 5 minutes, in English, in front of the Silicon Valley biggest investors was quite a challenge for Maria. As is the daily attempt to separate family and work life.

In the meantime, both companies' successes are today darkened by the new regulation on independent internet. Few months ago, Russia announced that the country has the infrastructure to deploy a closed web and activate it whenever the government wants. For Russian IT companies, it means that they can be compelled to stop working with international companies. Even though Artclever is prepared for such an eventuality, it would still make it impossible to use any foreign software from Russia.

In these complicated times, artists are all the more relevant.

“ I believe that art is the thing that asks questions and answers them. So now for Russian artists, it is a really good time to ask questions and provide answers. In Russia, great art was born in bad times. So now this is a good time for our national economy (given you are not IT and work only on the Russian market) and our national artists. I see the interest of the international art community. They want to know what we really are, what we really want to say”.

Maria is another example of the burning energy running through the new generation of Russian entrepreneurs and artists. Her testimony is important because it contains all the complexity of our time: craftsmanship cohabit with IT startups, globalization, the role of artists and the importance of art to build a cross cultural world, the necessity of education, the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, travelling as a way to get inspired, and parenthood in all of this ? Well, all of the above may be topics that cross our minds several times a day…

To follow Maria in her adventures, go check Instagram : @mariapokrovskaya, @artclever, @artclever_en, @canvascanvas.ru