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Hello everybody,

this is my first review in this forum,please excuse all my typos,english is only my third language.

Last weekend (Labor Day) I did for the 10th consecutive year the 3 day show on the Santa Fe Plaza run by the Fiesta Council of Santa Fe,NM.

Set up is always the day before, so on Friday.

Every artist gets 15 Minutes to unload,very convinient close to the booth spot.

Also you can park after the show close to your spot to load again, just a little

waiting time until it was my turn.

This year a new managment took over just days before the show, but everybody was very nice and helpful, better than ever before.

I always have the same booth spot for years and know my neighbors well over the years and it's always nice meeting those 3 Texas couples every year again.

Unforunatly since 2008 year after year the show gets worse what sales is concerned.

When I startde doing the show in 2004 the booth fee was $300 or $350, not sure any more and I went home with 6k or so, so very, very good.

A good show for me is when the booth fee was 10% of my sales.

Well this year my sales were down to under 2k but the booth fee was up to $450.

So I consider this show not a good show anymore.

There are more and more buy-sell "artists" in the show who sell cheap neck-coolers etc.

and people spend their little money with them and not with us artists anymore.

I do abstract paintings in oils and acrylis, ORIGINALS ONLY ! and sold just one painting.

Thanks heaven I also do bead work (like a gazillion others too) and jewelry always sells, as you all know.

So I will hold off on this show even so I live in Santa Fe just 2 miles away from the Plaza,

until the economy gets better.

Thanks for reading my review,

greetings from Santa Fe to all of you and have a great remaining summer

Heike

     This is the 3rd time I"m trying to get this online; don't know what I'm doing wrong...

Last weekend at Cantigny Park was wonderful. Erin did a great job organizing and setting things up. The set time was extended, 3-8pm on Friday and early morning Sat. 

There were plentiful volunteers to help out. The layout was lovely, set in a grove of large trees.  The tents were arranged in rectangular clusters of 6 booths facing outward with a hidden courtyard storage space behind the tents. This meant that 2 faced south side by side, 2 faced north side by side, and 1 faced east, 1 faced west.  The people streamed up both sides of the fair and wandered in and out of the clustered.

There were lots of people, lots of strollers. Not too many packages.  The packages I saw were photos, jewelry and ceramics.                                                                                  The break room was large, cold A/C and endless water, snacks, coffee and lemonade. There were also a couple of food vendors for the public, but nothing obnoxious. There was a beer-garden-music area that I thought was the weakest part of the show. I thought the music was very mediocre and primarily for dancing at a bar or wedding rather than sophicated, classical, jazz or even folk.  

One super cool thing that Erin set up was huge plastic surfaces for tagging and spray painting.The artists changed the designs from time to time from letters to arrows to birds. It was pretty wild and intriguing.

I didn't make expenses, I did have inquiries about commissions. And I had a fabulous time, met wonderful people, and hope to come back.

Well, I'm packed and ready to head down toward the Windy City way and my first Promenade of Art in Arlington Heights, Illinois. I'm excited, I can tell you.

Altthough this past Tuesday, Mukwonago had such high winds, hail and lighting that it shattered the boys plexiglass basketball hoop(good thing it fell to the right. Dan's antique refurbished 1963 Fury was to the left! Whew.) And it split our largest tree right down the middle......that was the one my oldest tried to saw down when he was a toddler! I thought it had nine lives....guess only two. Willow, my sober Maltese, and I were under the heavy computer desk in the basement. Too many tornadoes that are not in Kansas to suit me!

Anyway, if Connie asks, that's were I will be.

And I'll keep you posted.

Course, I'm no Nels....so don't expect a raconteur.

I'll do my best.

Anyone else going?

Re: Palm Springs show. I also did one of the three "Palm Springs" shows, the one in February which was billed as the "Classic" suggesting that it has been around for a while and is well received and sought after. Not so, Although Amado Pena (a well known artist in the southwest) was at the show as a favor to the show promoter the show did not deliver. First, it was not IN Palm Springs but rather in or on the border with Cathedral City near the corner with the Palm Springs Airport. The "venue" was an old drive-in theatre that had been paved over and was variously used as a flea market at times and before we (the artists) arrived was just being cleaned up from the Circus and camel poop which was supposed to have been gone by Tuesday, this being Thursday, we had to wait for them to haul out the Semi's. The show staff, as previously reported in another Blog post, were very gracious and tried to be helpful for various reasons. Thursday night it rained as well as Friday night so there was some standing water on the festival grounds. Brooms came out and the water was swept from the tents to other regions. (As an aside, one artist with beautiful glass pieces had her plastic covered cardboard pedestals out over night and when they put their work back out the next morning...leaning towers and broken glass, it was heartbreaking for her and to see it as well.) the staff quickly helped out with the cleanup. Second, although the show was well advertised in several venues, we found out later, when someone we had met at our hotel tried to find us he was directed to another show that WAS happening in downtown Palm Springs! Obviously, this other show having been well established for many years by another promoter on the very same Presidents Day Weekend. What were they thinking? Artists do talk and there were various rumors about the clash. The show promoter said that this other show had, at the last minute, rescheduled for the President's weekend. Who to believe? Out of curiosity we went downtown to try to catch this other "rogue" show, it had closed an hour earlier but there were still some artists hanging around that we talked to. The most gracious of the two, a ceramic artist, said that this Downtown show had been around for a long time and that the promoter was very easy to get along with, etc., etc. and that we should look into it. Judging from some other written reviews I've read about it, I'm not so sure...but that is another story. Third, visitation?  The show ran from Friday-Sunday, who does a holiday weekend show and begins it on a Friday when the holiday goes into Monday? The "crowds" did not show up on Friday, okay, that can be written off as a work day...the crowds did not show up en masse on Saturday or Sunday...by the end of it I was ready to have T-shirts made up with "I survived the Palm Springs "Classic"" and sell them to the other artists, I could've cleaned up, or at least made more than the sales from art that I was expecting! At least one "artist" (another story) left by the end of Friday, goodby! The rest of us stuck it out till the bitter end as our values suggest "you put your money down, you takes your chances".

The set up for the show really was well considered. As the space was big the tents were in quads so everyone had a corner booth for no extra money! Plenty of nearby parking. For the most part the artists chosen for the show were of really good quality so it wasn't as if there were just "rubber reptiles" there ( my euphemism for a really bad show). Although I could count 35 empty spaces which gave the place a feeling of an art show ghost town. A few were reportedly held hostage by a big snow storm in Tahoe. The rest I suspect had participated in the other two shows and cut their losses. There was plenty of water and snacks all weekend long, for the most part the weather cooperated, they did the right things but might reconsider where and when they have their shows. All in all, an experience I will remember but unfortunately not for the best of reasons, except for maybe the beauty of the snow topping the nearby mountains Saturday morning!