Connie Mettler's Blog – December 2011 Archive (12)

May 19

Marion, Iowa

Uptown City Square Park

50 Artists

Sat.: 9am-5pm

Deadline: January 16

• One Day.

• Fifty…

This is a special edition of our Call for Entries. Listed below are seventeen Midwest area professionally run art fairs by…

WHERE: Beautiful downtown St. Joseph, Michigan

WHEN:  Saturday and Sunday - July 14-15  

WHAT:  Krasl Art…

Art Fair 101 - Art Fairs - Not Nearly What I Expected

On December 20 at 3 pm we will host a live discussion with four artists who are relatively new to the art fair business. We had many requests to be on the panel but these four were chosen because of their persuasive emails. If they can speak as well as they write we are in luck! They represent…

A Better System of Judging for Awards

The Atlanta/Maitland Scoring & Judging System

by Les Slesnick

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN REMOVED AND IS BEING UPDATED

Merrill (Sonny) Dalton died, 78, on December 10 at Rose Arbor Hospice in Kalamazoo, MI, from complications  of pneumonia. Sonny was a fixture in the art fair business for 41 years and only stopped participating in art fairs when his deteriorating lung condition, caused by a lifetime of welding, made it too hard for him.

Sonny was one of those people who made…

Jacki Bilsborrow (my friendly admin on this site) and I headed to Chicago on December 2 specifically to visit the One of a Kind Show. 600 artists, who could resist this lure? What we found there:

• 126 jewelers and 148 wearables (clothing and accessories), some of these were double and even triple booths. All price points included, even a young woman who…

Artists have an especially hard time on the Internet because many (most?) artists fight the battle between art and commercialism daily.

It's especially hard to decide where to draw the line when selling art online.

You want your website to be as beautiful as your art.  You design a site that reflects your aesthetic but then you are disappointed with lackluster website sales.

Many artists…

• The prestige factor
• Dollars are easier to measure than beauty
• The thrill of the hunt
• New money skews the market

December 1-4 Miami Beach hosts Art Basel, the US's largest contemporary art fair, where the art sells in the $1,000,000 range and the elite meet to hang out and "out-status" one another. At the nation's fine art street fairs we often debate prices with one another and I laughed out loud when I read this (heard often at the shows): …

Lenny Lyons Bruno and her husband Gordon (Rick) Bruno are photographers we met at our first art fair in Ann Arbor in 1979. Both of them were very restless in their media and continued to push their imagery. When you saw them at an art fair you never were sure what they would be exhibiting as they were serious about exploring the creative life.

Lenny left photography behind probably about ten years ago and has worked in mixed media and painting in recent years. They both left the art…