#232: Leandra Drumm (Artist) (pt. 1 of 2)

This week on the podcast is part 1 of our interview with artist Leandra Drumm. Her works are sold in shops and galleries across the United States and Canada, and her artwork combines storytelling with humor and functionality. Leandra is known for her crystal wedding bowls decorated with words and charming figures spinning tales from bottom to the top, as well as dinner plates and glassware. In pewter she creates fanciful switch plates, wall hangings, ornaments, and measuring spoons, guaranteed to bring smiles. Her collections have been featured in Bon Appetit Magazine, the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and in newspapers throughout the US.  Make sure to tune in--and visit her website to see her imaginative art!

In this Episode:
Leandra shares about her transformative experience at Penland School of Crafts, her exploration of graphic design at Kent State University, and how the chance discovery of sandblasting eventually led her to follow her heart into the craft market. Leandra's story serves as a reminder of how following our passions can open paths we never expected.

Leandra takes us a step further into her world as she delves into the rich artistic legacy of her family and how it has profoundly shaped her work. From the sculptures and paintings of her grandfather to the mechanical inventions of her father, creativity clearly runs deep in her bloodline. Leandra also emphasizes the importance of self-sufficiency, a trait she proudly carries from her family, and the value she places on community art projects. Listen as she recounts the joy she experienced while creating the Light Up Lantern Festival, where performance and art harmoniously merged. Join us for this inspiring conversation with Leandra Drumm about art, family, and following your passions.

Show Notes: https://www.artsentrepreneurshippodcast.com/episodes/232-leandra-drumm-artist-pt-1-of-2

Transcript

Andy Heise: 0:00

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Announcer: 0:52

Welcome to the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast. Making art work. We highlight how entrepreneurs align their artistry, passion and vision to create and pursue opportunities to capture value in the arts. The views expressed by guests on the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the podcast or its hosts. The appearance of a guest on the podcast, the venture they represent or reference to any product or service does not imply an endorsement or recommendation by the podcast or its hosts. The content provided is for entertainment and informational purposes only and does not constitute business advice. Here are your hosts Andy Heiss and Nick Petrella.

Andy Heise: 1:34

Hello Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast listeners. My name is Andy Heise And

Nick Petrella: 1:39

We have Leandra Drumm with us today. She's an artist whose works are sold in shops and galleries across the United States and Canada. Her artwork combines storytelling with humor and functionality. Leandra is known for her crystal wedding bowls decorated with words and charming figures spinning tails from bottom to the top, as well as dinner plates and glassware In Pewter. She creates fanciful switch plates, and she's also a fan of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of art wall hangings, ornaments and measuring spoons guaranteed to bring smiles. Her collections have been featured in Bon Appétit magazine and the Boston Globe Sunday magazine and in newspapers throughout the US. Leandra's website is in the show notes so you can see her imaginative art. Thanks for being on the podcast, leandra.

Leandra Drumm: 2:22

Thank you for having me.

Nick Petrella: 2:24

Let's start by having you tell us about your career path after college.

Leandra Drumm: 2:29

Well, I'm going to back that up a little bit. As a young person, for the first part of my life, from baby in the basket to about age 10, my parents taught at Penland School of Crafts Craft School in the mountains of North Carolina and we grew up as kind of rug rats, playing with, you know, the ceramics from the ceramic studios, watching glass blowers blow glass, making jewelry, and so I always had an association with art as playtime and I didn't really think of it as something that I could create a livelihood from. So I entered into high school, signed up for the engineering program I was good at math at that time, so a little bit and I was fortunate that an art instructor identified me as somebody who could benefit from a college credit plus program at Akron University and I took my first college level class with Mark Soblin, who is an artist and sculptor, and from there I learned that there was an educational component that I would benefit from in the arts, that it wasn't just about creation and inspiration but that it was also about history, technique, medium, and that encouraged me to to kind of combine the math and the art and get my BFA in graphic design at Kent State University While I was at Kent State University I was still creating crafts. It was just my nature, and I was known for having sort of a black market of crafts that my fellow students would come to me for before the holiday so they could buy presents for their family. I should have known then, but I didn't.

Leandra Drumm: 4:16

And then my senior year, I passed by a sandblasting cabinet, and I'm old school, I was on the edge of computer technology, so I had a little bit of training, but the output hadn't matched the training at that time, and so I was using other forms to try to recreate the idea of a printed image passed by the sandblast cabinet and thought, hey, this is a great way to try to make something, an impression on the glass, and I absolutely fell in love with the process.

Leandra Drumm: 4:49

I love the idea of creating a permanent image on a surface, and so I started to create edge glassware in the living room of my apartment. In college, and before I graduate, or when I graduated, I had a choice whether to pursue a field or to pursue a career in the craft market or to go after those interviews, in the graphic design field. I would say that the difference between the graphic design field is that you have a client that is asking you to replicate their vision, and with the crafts I'm working to, I can create whatever it is that my heart desires and, if you're fortunate, you have a following and you don't really have to hear from the people who don't like your work. So I naturally chose to go in the craft field. So that's how I kind of ended up where I was after college.

Andy Heise: 5:43

Yeah, that's a great story. I love how you said you know your friends and peers would come to you to buy gifts for their parents. And you said and I didn't get it at that point, but it's just, you know, these things happen to us and we don't even know how to make sense of them until I don't know.

Leandra Drumm: 6:04

It's very strange to spend all that money on, you know, an education which was well worth it. I absolutely recommend it and it has served me in other ways that I never expected. But to walk out, you know, on that graduation day and think, hey, this isn't the path that I'm going to follow. I often think back to something somebody said where you should follow your early love of what you like to do that that's probably the path you should follow. If you like to dance, if you like art, you know that that's probably what you were meant to do, and so it was always there in front of me. As I said, I just saw it as sort of a play and I didn't know I could really enjoy and have fun, you know, doing what I do as a career.

Andy Heise: 6:49

That's cool, and so, as Nick stated in the opening, you sell in different shops and galleries. How does what's the arrangement with those stores and galleries on the business side Is it? Is it consignment, is it wholesale? How does that work?

Leandra Drumm: 7:04

Yeah, so typically we sell wholesale to galleries on net 30 terms. It's been more beneficial to us because we get sort of an immediate compensation that we can re-input into our work to buy materials and it's. You know, my mom had always told me that the best investment you can make early in your career is in your own work or your business. So we just kind of regenerate that. But consignment is usually something you like to do if you want to take. You know you have a larger piece and you might want it back if the gallery is unable to sell it or the gallery wants to take a chance on selling something new. But they were a little bit uncertain about their market. So, but wildly, after saying that, I sell to through my parents' gallery, Dunderman's Studios and Gallery consignment, and that's because they're, you know, kind of an old fashioned breed where they have a 60-40% split where the 60% goes to the artist and that gives us, you know, a little higher capital and also it gives us direct feedback as to what's selling to the customers a little more.

Nick Petrella: 8:18

Was it helpful in your career to have parents who are artists? I imagine seeing them deal with customers for many years left an impression.

Leandra Drumm: 8:26

Yes, I've definitely benefited from having you know family involved in the arts. My parents are a fantastic example of successful artists. My father, dondrum, is a sculptor who works in metals, and my mom is a fiber artist. Lisa Trump, sorry is a fiber artist who taught for many years in the public school system and then retired to run the gallery. And when they started the gallery it was literally my father searched for a place to set up his foundry and they had a small showroom in the front and they had a tiny bell and he said they carried their work and the work of their friends and when a customer come in they'd ring the bell, they'd kind of running up from the foundry service that customer and then go back to work. You know it clearly has grown from that point, but in those early age they were able to supplement that income through, you know, commission work or my mom's teaching. So it was a real learning lesson for me seeing them grow a business. It also a lot of my perspective comes from owning your own business and that was a huge learning lesson for me and I also.

Leandra Drumm: 9:36

I want to add that we are a family of artists, so a lot of people don't know that my history extends beyond my parents, that my grandfather on my mother's side was a well-recognized painter and sculptor in Erie Pennsylvania. His work is in the Erie Pennsylvania Museum. He was a teacher for many years and he has some very accomplished students. I don't know if you're familiar with pop art and Richard Anna Skevich, but he. The story I was told was that Cleveland School of Art would take anybody he recommended because they knew those students would have a strong foundation.

Leandra Drumm: 10:18

So we were exposed to his work growing up, as well as my father's side. His father was this wild mechanic inventor who built his own prop planes and created an amusement, well, a recreation center, built a man-made lake. He built wild amusement toys Like. He took merry-go-round pieces, the sculptures, the animals from merry-go-round pieces, and put them on these mechanical spider arms that would twirl around and go up and down. So a lot of my dad and my ability to construct and assemble, I think, comes from that lineage. So when we're looking at a project we're always thinking about how it connects or goes together.

Nick Petrella: 11:06

So which of your family, who in your family, inherited that particular art?

Leandra Drumm: 11:13

Well, my dad. He always had this amazing sense of how space works. So over the years, as I watched the gallery grow from this one-room garage, he would you know they'd build it upward vertically, but he would find space where I didn't see space, and I think it was part of that. He was creating different rooms. I think it also translated to his techniques for soldering and assemblage. It's still an area where I'm learning All my projects. I do think about how it can be assembled while I'm in the design process, but I still don't do a lot of three-dimensional work. My work tends to be on the flatter side.

Andy Heise: 12:05

Yeah, that's fascinating. So it sounds, I mean, very much in the self-sufficient, diy sort of attitude, right, I mean, if you need something, you figure out how to do it and you're going to sell your work, we're going to open a gallery and sell it ourselves. It seems like that's just kind of at its core for your family and your upbringing.

Leandra Drumm: 12:30

Yeah, I think that growing up in and owning your own business really gives you that idea of ownership and investment into what you do, because you have a direct feedback and association with those, whether something succeeds or not. And it also can be a negative, like I, my both my kids went to Miller South School for the visual and performing arts, which is amazing. But I remember going to my first meeting for as an arts booster parent for the visual arts program for my daughter, and we're sitting at this table and I didn't realize until that moment how insular, you know, visual artists can be. They need to sort of tune out, to go into their own head to design. And we're sitting around this table and they're like, hey, we need a table up in the gallery space. And they're saying, well, maybe I could get one from the office we might donate.

Leandra Drumm: 13:34

And I'm just going inside screaming like build it, build it, make it. Like you know, big of those, eight, top it. Just, you know that's how I approach everything is like how can I create this from scratch? How can I make something? Not, how can I buy it? Yeah, yeah.

Andy Heise: 13:51

You know you mentioned artists can be insular sometimes and we often think of the lone artist right working in their studio making their things. But there's also you. It sounds like you was you enjoy sort of the community aspect of it too. Have you done some community art projects?

Leandra Drumm: 14:09

Yes, absolutely. I was fortunate, after you know, launching my career as a craftsman about when I was after I met my husband and got married and I had an opportunity to develop and create a festival called the Light Up Landry Festival in the University Park area and that's kind of around Akron University and the Gout, my parents' gallery. It was Originally started as a method to engage the community and to build support for the development they were creating from the university. So it was. I showed up for a board meeting in which they assigned duties and I didn't know that was going to happen and fortunately they said hey, you can be a vet planner, and I took it and just ran with it. I decided so. I worked with the community to teach lantern making and then I collaborated with artists around the area. I was a politician kind of half the year just trying to identify artists and their skill set and then encouraging them to be involved in this event and what we would.

Leandra Drumm: 15:25

I have to backtrack a little bit because the prefaces for the idea kind of came from seeing a small. I have friends that are in theater, they're performers and they had a venue where they did a backstage performance. It was very intimate and, as I jokingly say, you could see the sweat coming off their faces. But I was just entranced by that and I'm like why didn't I know about this until so late in my life, and are other people having this experience? And so I wanted to bring that to and make it available to anyone for free. And so it kind of started by engaging them and also working on blurring that line between performance and art. And so what we would do is we collaborate with artists to build stages for musicians, theater performers, and then we wanted to enhance that space. So an example would be that we would choose themes each year, and one year we chose kind of Gypsy Caravan as our theme. We worked to build a caravan and that caravan would have a curtain and the first performance would be we had a guitarist who had a double neck guitar and he would do performance. And then we would pull down a white screen and we had Akron University students who created laser cut shadow puppets and they did an amazing performance with the shadow puppets. And then we would pull up the screen and then we had Dr Skechies with a life model and families would come over and draw on these light boards.

Leandra Drumm: 17:10

But it was an amazing lesson and you can enhance someone's life with such a small element of art in such an amazing way. So I'm sorry I'm meandering on, but one thing I specifically remember is I would go around besides putting out the fires all night about electronics and everything else, but I would go around with this sort of black light liquid and I would take two siblings and I would draw on one's face and they wouldn't see anything, and the other siblings looking like I don't want my face painted, and then you would shine. You have them close their eyes. The first put, you would shine this black light on their face and all of a sudden they had this whole amazing design on their face. And then the second sibling would be like screaming me, me, me, me.

Leandra Drumm: 17:56

But just in little ways it just became magical. So but I should say on the business side, I learned about grant writing, seeking support and sponsorship. I am lucky that when I started there was a lot I didn't know, and I learned that along the way, because if I had known how many permits and other things that I need to acquire to produce this festival, I probably have been so overwhelmed. But yeah, it was just incredible collaboration where one artist has a skill set and another one combines to do a greater project was just huge learning lesson for me to not be insular.

Nick Petrella: 18:38

Do you do a lot of grant writing?

Leandra Drumm: 18:41

I don't now. You know I did then and it was important for me. I was willing to go through that process because I thought it was a pert important component to learn and it was, you know, when you're part of a nonprofit, that was very important. I don't, in my own business, have a need for that component.

Nick Petrella: 19:04

You specialize in pewter and etched glassware. Is there a high barrier to entry for others who want to work in those mediums?

Leandra Drumm: 19:13

I kind of like to think that you can start at any level. There is an expense in purchasing equipment when I do the etched glassware. When I started out, I started out by going to secondhand stores and buying blank glass pieces. Then I would cut all my masking materials by hand so I could do it in a very affordable way. I have to say that at the time I was doing this, technology wasn't where it is today. That was the method I had to use. I bought a secondhand sandblasting cabinet that looked like a small incubator and a secondhand compressor. There wasn't expense in acquiring that equipment, but I think now it's more affordable because we have more fab labs and a bounce. Innovation hub is a place where you might get a head start in starting your craft and have access to equipment. I wouldn't say huge barrier, but it's easier now with having those tools available to us. It did take a little time to get to where I was, where I could afford a cutter and modernize my business.

Nick Petrella: 20:35

What made me think of that? It's actually a follow-up question If you're working with acid or sandblasting and I don't know how big your operation is do you need air scrubbers or any other type of waste abatement?

Leandra Drumm: 20:47

No, we're a small scale. We actually work out of a residential building. I have a circular system with my sandblast cabinet. I use oxidized aluminum as opposed to silicone sand where you don't want to get silicosis. It's heavier and the weight after you shoot it through the nozzle it pretty much falls to the bottom of the cabinet. But I do have an air filter system that captures the particles that are flying through the air in the cabinet, recaptures it and sends it back through the tube. It stays within that unit so I don't have to worry as much about a larger system or waste abatement issue.

Nick Petrella: 21:35

That's good, in case anyone from Mocha is listening. Yeah, exactly.

Leandra Drumm: 21:39

I'm clean, I'm environmental.

Announcer: 21:46

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