Sarasota Craft Show Lives On

Richard Rothbard

What strikes me as strange in this economy is that promoters with over twenty years experience will cancel shows because they can't get enough artists at their prohibitively high booth fees, instead of offering booth fee reductions and making less profit for a year or two, enabling the artists to do shows at a rate they can afford and continue to stay in business. And it may not be only a year or two, the business of art and craft shows may be changing forever. More about that another time.

In a move that doesn't surprise me, Richard Rothbard has taken over the Sarasota (formally ACC) December dates and offering a much lower booth fee. He sent out the following e-mail:

Good News regarding ACC Sarasota & Charlotte Shows
"The Sarasota Craft Show is on! The Charlotte Show is on the table waiting for a consensus from Charlotte exhibitors. To ALL ACC exhibitors This is your special INVITATION to both Sarasota and Charlotte, so SAVE THE DATES. The shows will be managed by Richard & Joanna Rothbard of American Art Marketing who have 28 years of experience in show management, are NYC gallery owners since 1985 and exhibiting artists for almost 3 decades. Booth fees will be substantially lower, same high standards, and we will be working with the marketing team that has made the event so successful. Further details, Invitation & Application forms will be available on our website by May 7/8. Show dates: December 4,5,6. and November 6,7,8.
Those of you who would like to see Charlotte continue this year need to respond accordingly. The Sarasota Show is under contract...I am looking forward to hearing from you.
If you wish to receive a hard copy application by snail mail or have questions please email your request to e-mail Richard or call 800-834-9437"

It Feels Good to Buy Handmade

by Jerry Kermode
Throughout the early 70s at the end of the hippie movement, it was a time to reflect about the craziness of the 60s; the Vietnam era and the civil unrest that had come before. One of the things that has made America great is the people and things we’ve done with our hands and our brains; the entrepreneurs. And that’s what crafters are. And so my feeling is that the general population wanted to be around the people who made things by hand doing what they could do best. It was a good thing to be around us and everyone bought a funky little coffee mug and people hung out at the parks and played the guitars. It was a fun time. We did our first show in Laguna Beach in 1970 and I remember it rained so hard that we made the newspaper because we had a couple of friends with guitars and a violin and everyone huddled under our tent singing and playing music. I don’t remember making any money. Both the hippies and the rich people flocked to those shows. It was just a fun time to buy really high quality stuff made by the people standing in front of you. An acknowledgement of what America was, and still is today. And I think people are reaching back for that because those were the things that really had meaning and made people feel good.

Wendy Rosen on Why the Jury System is Flawed

From a conversation with Wendy Rosen, director of the Buyers Market of American Craft, the nation’s largest wholesale craft trade show.
The standard craft show jury system does not allow for the revelation of whose work you’re looking at, and so you could be looking at derivative work made by someone who’s actually copying the original designs of someone else. That’s the first reason. The second reason is that sometimes photographs of great work look terrible and photographs of bad work looks great. The photographs are not always representational, and the worst thing that an artist can do is take their own photographs. Click here to read the entire article.