Jessica Poundstone remembers the message that changed her life.

It was a note through Instagram from an art advisory firm saying, hey, we love your work.

We'd love to discuss using it in a hotel project that we're working on to get in touch.

Poundstone makes her living as a visual artist.

But at the time, she was working as a creative director for a software company.

The message was intriguing.

So she did a little research.

I was not familiar with the concept of art advisory firms at the time.

And so I looked them up, quickly kind of understood their business model,

and was like, wow, this is very cool.

Today, Poundstone works with a dozen art advisory firms. They help her sell her work to commercial

spaces across the world, cruise ships, casinos, restaurants, and hotels.

Art in a hotel is everywhere when you really think about it. You go to the elevator,

there's a piece of art either behind you or next to you. Sometimes in the elevator itself,

there will be artwork that's in the form of wallpaper or maybe a painted mural.

When you get to your floor, there's artwork on a little table or at the end of the hallway.

And then you go into your room and there's more artwork.

Having stayed in many hotels and looked at a lot of hotel art felt like my artwork would be nice to have in a room

that someone was staying in instead of something that was just, I don't know, boring or worse,

just terrible.

When you think of hotel art, you might imagine a generic photograph of a city skyline or a bad take on an

abstract painting. The stuff on the walls at most big hotel chains is bland and forgettable

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