This last Saturday was the Winter Market held at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis Indiana. This was my 5 or 6th Eiteljorg show (I also participate in the Women in Art show in the spring) and overall it was in keeping with past shows.
Load in is not the easiest as you have to park at a curb - traverse a winding ramp to gain access into the museum and then depending upon booth location possibly load onto a very small elevator.
This year, layout was more challenged by the addition of an exhibet devoted to trains that took up much of our prior artist space. Because of this - upstairs space was utilized, booth sizes were greatly diminished and artist numbers were reduced greatly.
We were not thrilled to find ourselves upstairs in a smaller darker location - but our neighbors were friendly - we bring our own lighing just in case and we made it all work.
Being upstairs - we believe our foot traffic was not what the main floor artists had in numbers - but we were still happy to be in the show at all as many past artists were not accepted due to the diminished numbers.
Load in was helped by being able to load in the afternoon prior to the Saturday event (thankful I did that as it was snowing hard and very wet Saturday morning). Load out was slowed because of the bottleneck at the elevator - but still only took us a bit longer than our usual hour strike.
My husband and I paint and do photography. Sales were fairly good - this is always one of our better shows as the crowd tends to be a little more high end. We sold one nice sized painting as well as a couple smaller ones, some photographs and notecard sets as well as a number of smaller miniscape paintings.
I have been noticing a trend lately that people are purchasing more what I would call purposeful art - ceramics and jewelry and perhaps a bit less decorative.
All in all a great way to spend a snowy Saturday. This was our last show of 2010 - next up is the Indiana Artists show at the Indiana State Museum in February. This will be a new one for us - so I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes.
Happy arting all!
-k-
Comments
January is a good month to devote to the creation of new pieces. :)
Will be sure to look for you at Indiana Artists show in Feb. Have you done it in the past? I'm curious as to what to expect as it will be our first time.
Are you a jeweler? I'm sure I saw your booth - but want to make sure I chat with you in February.
Have a great holiday season!
-k-
As for this show - we were on the main floor, while we may have had a little more traffic, in reality it wasn't what I had hoped for...not sure how much weather played a role and how much was a lack of marketing (PS... that isn't the organizers fault, she has to go through the museums marketing dept and apparently they are ridiculously bad about actually producing anything...so bad that they put out an advertisement in the paper that said free admission so the museum HAD to honor it even though they were supposed to be charging for the Jingle Rails exhibit!!)
We load in from the garage, use the tower elevator, a short walk under the portico and you're in...avoided the yucky weather that way and no inclines/ramps. There was a bit of a wait to go down during load out, but not bad.
I'd still like to see them do a better job of booth positioning - or let us know more in advance so we can see if there will be conflicts. On the main floor there was A LOT of media grouping - three potters, followed by three jewelers, a mixed media artist, then three more jewelers all in a line. Some of that I know was due to artists upstairs insisting on being moved downstairs....
As for sales - it definitely wasn't one of my worst shows this year, but it wasn't my best either. My average price point was easily $20 higher than usual.
See you in Feb!