Ebonique Boyd & Anya Ellis
Traditional art galleries and auction houses are exclusionary by design. Ebonique Boyd was determined to make fine art accessible to everyone, and her sister Anya Ellis knew artificial intelligence was the way to do so. These were the convictions that led to Budget Collector, their egalitarian art collection app.
What provoked you to launch your business?
I saw a piece at Sotheby's or Christie's of an unknown African woman painted by a pre-18th century European artist that was listed at $5,000. I wanted to buy it and put it in my cart, but then the auction house had a fee of something like $20,000. It got into my mind that there might be other works like this in the world without that outrageous fee and that I could one day buy a painting like this one. I thought to myself that I was willing to buy this at $5,000, so let me just spend money to find another piece without that fee.
I started researching more on the art business and developing several low-tech solutions to solve my problem. I had to pick up my sister Anya Ellis, who was majoring in computer science, from the University of Illinois-Chicago when the COVID-19 outbreak happened and quarantine her at my apartment for a few weeks. I would talk about my solution and she said I should just use artificial intelligence and that it would be very easy. I kept asking her, "How is it easy?" while she kept asking for equity. She answered all my questions and she got her equity.
Talk to us about the experience of being Black women starting a business at the intersection of investing, art, and data – what has this been like?
Being Black women often means that people expect you to not ignore biases, stereotypes, and injustices. During our research stage, we met with several prominent art officials and were very surprised by what they revealed about the industry and the impact that has had on their conscience. I think just the fact that we are Black allowed us to obtain information that might not have been revealed if we were someone else. This allowed us to dream up a better system for the whole art world because people were less likely to build up a wall of superficialness and pretension around us.
What have you learned through witnessing the legacy of Black entrepreneurs who have come before you in your industry?
Many black entrepreneurs that I met have had their ideas stolen and given to white entrepreneurs by venture capitalists. We sought to patent and surround ourselves in some form of legal protection before seeking out capital, because the system isn’t built for everyone.
Who is your community? Talk to us about how you uniquely empower your community through Budget Collector?
We want our community to be everyone eventually, because we think everyone deserves fine art. However, we realize the path to market dominance is through small niches growing larger and we are working on that plan right now.
The AI Art Advisor that we are building would allow everyone to have access to an art advisor for free rather than just the rich. Oftentimes, we see businesses wanting to use technology to bring a cheap version of a luxury item to the masses. We want our AI Art Advisor to actually be a better service than what the rich could afford being more accurate, more personalized, and less biased.
