My husband, sculptor Jim Goshorn, had one of those "I think I'll try that." moments with this first time show in Dickson Tennessee. The show was held the last weekend in June and they did a lot of things right. As is always true of first year shows, there were some mistakes. But overall Jim and I think the show was a good one. Despite over 100 degrees heat index and low, low attendance we made some sales. Firefly must have done a pretty good mailing to get such a concentrated art buyer crowd. Load in and load out was easy. Those of us in the shade were hunky-dory, those in the sun were offered help to move Friday evening.Pluses included the Renaissance Center - a fabulous art center; Snacks and water all day long, Dinner Friday night and breakfast on Sunday. A REALLY nice acceptance package and some good publicity.On the downside, parking for the patrons was a mess -- we were told Patrons would have access to the paved parking lot next year.Pretty good score for this event... hope they keep improving...At any rate, we made more at this small venue than we did in East Hampton the following weekend!
We were there as well. Should have called it Fire-Flee as about 10-12 artists pulled up stakes and bailed after the first day, and not just because of the heat. There was nobody there! A group of us started counting parked cars and estimated that they maybe got 2000 people to come out for it (a far cry from the 25,000 they promoted in their materials!) They let artists who had no shade move to shady areas if they wanted to-not feasible for us as it would have taken us at least 7 hours to take down and re-set back up. That left us and 3 other artists on our row who also couldn't move-so we sat in the blazing hot sun for two of the three days on a ghost-town of a row. After some of us pointed this out ,volunteers moved a large empty tent to our row to make it look like there was more of us there than there really were, but it was amateur hour at its best . Volunteers were great though, and kept us supplied with drinks, snacks and cool washcloths to beat the heat back.
I was there. The show seemed to be boycotted by locals. There were more people in the local grocery store on Sat at 8 am than attended the show all day. About 5 top notch artist who do the best shows in the country had zero sales and left the show a day early stating they never did that before. Yes, it was hot, but they would have stayed if there were people there. I would never return.
Connie,
Firefly was just the name of the event. The organization putting it on was the Renaissance Center there. Dickson is about an hour west of Nashville.
Yes, it sometimes seems the smaller shows have been better lately than big established ones or ones in higher income demographics.
Jennie
Thanks for this report, Jenzen. My husband was like that too...ready to try new ones out of the blue. Sometimes they were winners and sometimes not. If not too far, or too expensive, usually well worth the risk.
Where is Dickson? Why do you think they were able to pull this crowd together?
Who is Firefly? is it an event company?
Your experience at East Hampton (are you saying in New York?) vs the Tennessee experience is one of the things that make doing art fairs so addictive...you never know when the good one is going to happen.
Comments
Firefly was just the name of the event. The organization putting it on was the Renaissance Center there. Dickson is about an hour west of Nashville.
Yes, it sometimes seems the smaller shows have been better lately than big established ones or ones in higher income demographics.
Jennie
Where is Dickson? Why do you think they were able to pull this crowd together?
Who is Firefly? is it an event company?
Your experience at East Hampton (are you saying in New York?) vs the Tennessee experience is one of the things that make doing art fairs so addictive...you never know when the good one is going to happen.