about us

Groupform is a community for artists and collectors who want something different and fundamentally believe we are stronger together in an "intentional" community than navigating platforms and institutions alone.

We exist for people who believe art is still made by hand, built through patience, and held together by relationships rather than algorithms.

Today’s cultural platforms reward speed, sameness, and endless output. They turn artists into content channels and collectors into metrics. We’re building the opposite: a slower, quieter, more intentional place where the human voice matters, the hand is visible, and the connections between artist and collector feel real.

The People

Christy Thiaucourt has over twenty-five years working in design and the arts. She began her career in the first wave of web startups in 1998 and has navigated multiple technological and consumer marketing shifts over the decades. None, however, have been as consequential or disruptive for artists and designers as the one we face today.

Christy has worked with leading design and strategy firms including Huge Inc. and McKinsey & Company, advising organizations through periods of large-scale change. She holds a Master’s degree in Modern Art from Christie’s New York, grounding her work in critical art history, the art market, and contemporary practice.

Alongside her professional career, Christy is an abstract painter. Her studio practice is a way of searching for simplicity and raw emotion through simple forms, material, and color, informed by the legacy of women artists who have used abstraction as a language of the natural world that communicates clarity, emotion, and beauty.

Across every phase of her career, Christy has worked at the intersection of systems, design, and culture. That perspective has sharpened into a clear concern about the future of artists and creative labor. The challenges artists face today are not simply the result of new technology. They reflect deeper structural failures in how artistic production, value, and authorship are supported.

The traditional art market, as it currently exists, is not leading artists toward a stable or healthy future. The recent closure of many galleries is not evidence that art has simply moved online. It is evidence that the infrastructure built around artists’ production grew too large and too rigid, especially in a world where taste and aesthetic value have become increasingly narrow and singular.

Artists are often left navigating systems that create a specific type of visibility without offering long-term sustainable careers. Current pathways for artists that limit output in the name of scarcity, focus on a limited few, and demand constant participation simply to stay afloat are not sustainable in a new AI-driven world. At the same time, artists’ independent nature often means they are slow to organize or claim collective leverage, even as their work is more exposed than ever through AI and increasing infringements on artist rights.

Christy believes the future of artistic practice depends on artists taking greater ownership of their production, circulation, and value. Sustainable lives as artists will not come from exposure alone, nor from models that rely solely on gatekeeping and artificial scarcity. They will come from artists reclaiming agency over how work is made, shared, protected, and monetized.

Artists spend a lifetime developing skills in materials, mediums, aesthetic judgment, and visual intelligence. Those skills should be usable across many contexts and capacities, not constrained by outdated market structures. Artists should also have the option to work anonymously, sell anonymously, or remain private when that best serves their work and livelihood.

In practice, this means designing systems that protect artists while supporting sustainable creative lives. It means creating pathways where artists can work as artists, designers, and independent thinkers without being forced into a single market role. It means recognizing that the true value of the artist lies not in a single object, but in a lifetime of trained perception, craft, and decision-making.

Christy’s work today is focused on helping artists protect their work while building durable, self-directed futures on their own terms.

This is not about resisting change.

It is about ensuring artists can continue to exist within it.