Nate Burbeck

Projects

   

Started in July 2012 primarily as a curatorial side project, Fly Over Art was a regionally themed art blog on Tumblr. It was the first in what would eventually become a four-part, national art blog project. Fly Over Art’s concept was to feature the work of mostly contemporary fine artists ranging from established professionals to emerging young artists working in all media who were either originally from or primarily based in the Midwestern United States.

Each post featured a set of images and examples of an individual artist's work along with links to their personal portfolio website and (if applicable) any other blogs and important entries associated with their work. Fly Over Art also featured its own internal directories utilizing Tumblr’s post tagging system. Directories included a States page which allowed users the ability search for posts featuring artists based on their listed location, including searching by individual states or cities as well as listed art media (painting, sculpture, installation, etc). The States page also linked to a Full Artist Directory which listed every artist featured on the site alphabetically, categorized by location state.

Working with the same regional theme and internal structure, Beyond 9th Avenue was launched in October 2012 as the first “sister blog” spin off, this time featuring the work of artists from the Northeastern United States. The creation and launch of Beyond 9th Avenue was followed by two other sister blogs: In The New Frontier was launched in December 2012, featuring the work of artists from the West and later in August 2013, Dim With Beauty of launched, featuring the work of artists from the South.

With the growth of the project came a growing following. Fly Over Art was featured on the Tumblr Art Spotlight in January 2013 and at one point had over 73,000 followers. Beyond 9th Avenue and In The New Frontier also gained over several thousand followers each. Combined the four regional blogs would eventually feature the work of nearly a thousand individual artists throughout the United States.

Despite continued success and a steadily growing following the collective project had in short time morphed into something much more involving than originally anticipated. With a growing workload of potential but a desire to focus my energies elsewhere the regional art blog project was eventually discontinued, with regular posting ending in December 2013. Today, all four blogs still remain hosted on Tumblr, but no longer actively posts new content.