Blog

We traveled to Purdue country, the home of the Boilermakers and the setting for the Round The Fountain Art Fair. It was the 37th year for this 1 day event and my second year participating.

The event is held in the center of Lafayette around a grand old courthouse (pictured here). Most of the artist's booths (75%) line the sidewalks that circle the perimeter of the courthouse and the remaining artists setup on the courtyard inside perimeter walls (yes, there is a fountain on one of the corners of the courtyard...not humongous.). Setup is the Friday evening before but only after 6PM. There is little coordination; mostly artists are left to their own good manners. From a sales perspective, this setup works fairly well; there is a small enough number of artists that everyone is visited. However, as an artist it is much easier setting up on the street since you must dolly everything into the courtyard from only a few entry points (a wall circles the courtyard).

Nearly 100 artists participated and the quality of the art work was good. The selection jury did a good job screening. The show offers few amenities: no security, no booth sitters, no water, there were coupons for a free cup of coffee at a nearby cafe. Parking is limited to a garage so trucks and trailers are on their own. They did have artist awards (several) and they did produce a nice brochure that is freely distributed to patrons by a team of volunteers. The amenities are not a big deal for me, keep the focus on marketing. That said, I think Friday night security is kinda basic and not all that costly. As artists, we all hung our wares and hoped for the best. I didn't hear of any thievery.

OK, the bottom line, How was the show? This is a solid little show and sales were good though maybe a little down for some (this is based on my very scientific survey of "So how ya doing?"). The weather was hot, high 80's, and most of the crowd came out to buy in the morning. By 1PM I could hear the crowd crying "We're melting, we're melting." and sure enough they did. Those few hours in the morning were great for sales! Sales at this show were interesting for me ... I sold a few of my most expensive framed items and many, many of my smallest items. Very few sales in the middle. Sales were either high or low. As the show was finishing, I had matched the exact number of items sold and total gross dollar amount to nearly the dollar from last year. But then ...in the last 5 minutes of the show, I made a custom sale of my largest piece... whoo-hoo, a great way to end the day.

Places for improvement: If there's an area that the show needs improvement on, it's communication with artists. The phone number was removed from the web site and was not published in any information package. Everyone was required to communicate via email. This would be fine if there was a response to emails... only cyber-silence. Many artist expressed frustration about this. Here's the show number for future reference: 765-491-6298

The jurying seems to work. Five images of your work and a booth image is required. They use a homegrown system and image size is limited to 400 pixels. That's rather small for viewing details. The jury image is about as large as the image I posted above.

Overall, this is a good show and I do recommend it. The community supports it, booth fee is low, layout is good, but you just need to know that there are not a lot of amenities.

Cheers,