Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts

A dynamic regional contemporary art center needed ongoing support for their exhibitions and marketing efforts. Flatpage stepped in to provide copyediting services so that they can always put their best foot forward with their catalogues and press releases.

Project Background

Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts is a contemporary art venue based in Omaha, Nebraska, that hosts an international residency program, exhibitions, and educational programs. Rachel Adams, chief curator and director of programs, initially contacted Flatpage to copyedit a multiauthor exhibition catalogue she was planning for a show about sound art entitled Root of Two, which included some contributions from multilingual authors.

I knew [Flatpage’s Cofounder] Cara from Buffalo and had been following Flatpage as it started. I knew that she had a group of exhibition catalogue copyeditors that would be great for our needs, so it was just the right fit.

Rachel Adams, Chief Curator and Director of Programs

Following this successful collaboration, Flatpage has continued to provide exhibition catalogue editing and other copyediting services for press releases for Bemis’s marketing department, ensuring that the texts used consistent language and were free of mechanical errors.

The Collaboration

Copyediting is used to address issues with grammar, punctuation, and language. During an exhibition catalogue edit, the copyeditor will use the institution’s house style guide or a commonly used style guide like the Chicago Manual of Style to implement consistency across one publication or across many types of content.

For this multiauthor book, Flatpage’s editor needed to preserve each author’s unique voice while maintaining consistency in the punctuation, spelling, and citations, particularly for contributions by multilingual writers. Therefore, our copyeditor worked on each essay using a style sheet—a live document based on the house style guide that is tailored to the project.

Consisting of essays, captions, acknowledgements, and a colophon, the catalogue totalled approximately 10,000 words. The curator sent each contribution via a shared file server and the editor tallied their progress on a project tracker to ensure they met the client’s deadline. In total, the project took about ten days to complete.

Flatpage was very easy to work with and I really had no qualms. The timing was perfect and everything was smooth.

Flatpage has also collaborated with Bemis’s marketing team to copyedit various texts, including an essay for an exhibition guide and press releases announcing upcoming exhibitions and events.

The Outcome

The exhibition catalogue for Root of Two was published alongside the exhibition and Flatpage’s collaboration with the Bemis Center has resulted in several other successful projects to date.

Flatpage is easy to work with, the pricing is very good and they have a range of editors with different backgrounds, so that helps with finding the right person to edit your writing. I’ve been very happy with them!