Pair of sisters behind Adore Your Walls bring art everywhere, for everyone

Liz Lidgett was working as an in-house art curator for a corporation in Des Moines when she saw an opportunity to start a company to help corporations with their art collections.

“There are some incredible art collections here in Des Moines but for whatever reason they weren’t being taken care of,” Lidgett said Tuesday. “They needed somebody to help them.”

So she left her corporate job and started Adore Your Walls in 2013 to help corporations specifically with their art collections. Lidgett would go ont to find restaurants wanted help and eventually homeowners became customers.

“I want people to love the spaces they are in,” Lidgett says. “Whether it’s their office, home or if they are walking down the street. I want people to love where they are, and I want that to happen through artwork.”

Adore Your Walls launched its website in 2015 to make art more accessible and affordable to customers outside of Iowa. From $20 digital prints to $1 million paintings, Lidgett says they can help with every step of the art buying process.

“How to find what you like, some great artists, how to frame it, all these different angles to do with the artwork,” Lidgett says. “We do Instagram art sales where people just write sold under the piece and we ship it to them. We are comfortable in that uncomfortable area and what to learn and expand. It gets us up in the morning.”

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Walls are a blank canvas

Through its website Adore Your Walls offers several advisory art packages that range from $50-$250 along with having individual clients and commercial work.

But a pet project that started as an email at 3 a.m. from Liz to her sister and Chief Operating Officer Kate Wagner is connecting artists with businesses who have spacious walls.

Wagner said the email just said, “Murals.”

“We have this opportunity to paint on the canvas of Des Moines,” Wagner says. “We can impact what the future of the City of Des Moines is going to look like.”

And while they didn’t actually paint a single mural Adore Your Walls organized the “Cheers From Des Moines” mural at Exile Brewery, all 12 murals at RoCA in Des Moines and a couple in Ankeny.

Some of the murals are featured in new photos at the Des Moines International Airport. 

“We are making places that people are taking their friends when they come into town,” Lidgett says.

“We like seeing wedding parties outside and bus loads of people, it’s cool to feel like we’re part of that,” Wagner said.

Staying local

Regardless of the client and project, Adore Your Walls makes an effort to showcase local artists.

“When we have artwork coming from all over the world, I love inserting artists from Des Moines in that because it shows the incredible art scene here,” Lidgett says. “Our artists are on par with anywhere else in the world.”

Lidgett said in May they worked with over 40 local artists.

“When we get new clients we ask would they like if they would like the artists to be just from Iowa, or Des Moines, and 75 percent of the time they say yes,” Lidgett says. “People see the value in that, which is great.”