Members

We are a gallery in a town of six thousand people, in the poorest corner of New Mexico, showing work to anyone who walks in off Main Street. Some of what we make pays for itself and a lot of it never will. Membership is how that second kind gets made. In the words of the letter that started our first membership in 2021, it is “to fund artistic endeavors which are not commercially viable, but are necessarily imperative in their creation.”

We have worked this way since January 2021, when our project Intentionally Confusing started asking a worldwide network of micro-patrons to support experimental art directly. We still think the same thing we did then. Rather than performing for platforms that harvest everyone’s attention, we are our own platform, and the people who value the work fund the work.

One account, one door

A membership is one account at members.torc.art that works across everything we build. There are no passwords. We email you a six digit code, or you can use a passkey. Joining is free, and a free membership is a real membership.

What membership opens

• Gather, our small community gathering place. Text first, images second. Posts stay up for seven days and then they are gone. There are no likes and no follower counts, and everything is signed. Any member can join and write while the first 144 seats are open, and paying members keep the ability to write for good.
• Proofing, the voting field of the Periodic, our printed publication. Anyone can look, and members vote up or down on the image treatments and bits of writing, laid out exactly as they would print. What the members choose is what goes to press.
• The Periodic in your mailbox. The Periodic of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico is a hand sewn zine with letterpress covers, growing into a quarterly tabloid newspaper. Paying members with a mailing address on file get each edition in the post as it ships.

Membership does not buy status. There are no public profiles, no badges and no list of who supports us. The work is what is on display, never the members.

The ladder

All plans are monthly. Stripe takes the payment, so we never see your card, and your invoices, plan changes and cancelling all happen in Stripe’s portal, where cancelling is exactly as easy as signing up. If you stop paying your membership stays. Paying is a way to support torc.art directly, never a requirement.

What the money does

Membership money pays for the parts of this place that will never make money: the community etching press priced at cost, exhibitions and performances in a town the art market has never heard of, the Periodic, and paying artists fairly. We pay artists monthly and take the lowest commission we can manage. The gallery is our art project before it is a business, and members are how we keep the doors open.

Join at members.torc.art.