Almost 1,000 artists attended Ann Arbor’s 65th annual art fair, which ran from Thursday morning through Saturday evening. The Ann Arbor Art Fair is composed of three unique art fairs: the Ann Arbor Street Art Fair, the original; the Guild’s Ann Arbor Summer Art Fair; and the State Street District Fair. The event also includes a variety of entertainers and food vendors dispersed throughout the fair. This year’s fair was sponsored by pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Company. The company maintained four booths across the fair that provided free health screenings and clinical study information to visitors.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Music, Theatre & Dance rising senior Maja Pechanach, event operations intern for the Guild’s fair, said a great deal of work goes into organizing such a large event.
“We had to get in contact with so many different people,” Pechanach said. “Electricians, renting our own tents … we had to find ways to get barricades. We closed the streets on Tuesday morning this year, and Monday and Tuesday was all mapping. We were out on the streets measuring and chalking (spaces) for 400 booths. The fair is so much more than just the three days that people are here.”
Charlotte Fung Miller, a Chinese brush painter, works with watercolor paints on rice paper and has participated in the Art Fair for 40 years. Miller said in an interview with The Daily the size of the event can present organizational challenges.
“The challenge of this art show is the logistics,” Miller said. “(But) it’s the best of all the shows I do. Even though it’s longer hours, you have more hours of selling. It’s good to have it later and longer, even though it’s tough for the artists to have such long hours.”
Miller said the Ann Arbor Art Fair is unique from other art fairs not only due to its size, but also due to the important role of the arts in the Ann Arbor community.
“The highlight of the show is the high interest for art in this community, I can’t speak enough of that,” Miller said. “I’ve never met so many people that are as interested in art as this show.”
Wayne Trinklein is a sculptor who has been vending at the Guild’s Art Fair for eight years. In an interview with The Daily, Trinklein also noted his experience of the Ann Arbor community has been one that uniquely appreciates the arts.
“The people in Ann Arbor, by and large, are people who appreciate my trees,” Trinklein said. “They tend to be concerned about meaning and purpose. The people who come into my booth are people who are hopeful, joyful and recognize that in life happiness comes from being yourself.”
But Trinklein noted one of the challenges he faced was how to translate that interest in art to actual sales.
“When you go to an art fair, the goal is to sell stuff,” Trinklein said. “And so every art fair is a challenge in how do you set up your booth? How do you direct traffic? What do you put out front and what do you put in the back? Are you looking for awards … you’re adjusting your inventory in a way that you’re selling to certain crowds and they’re all different.”
Teesha Lieber, a marbling painter who participated in the State Street Fair, told The Daily in an interview she felt it is sometimes difficult to know exactly what audience to prepare to sell to.
“Because it’s an art fair, you don’t know 100% what your audience is going to be,” Lieber said. “A challenge is having all the different price points from something an art student can purchase to something that somebody might put on a large wall.”
Lieber also said the people at the Art Fair, both the patrons and the vendors, created a wonderful community.
“The crowd has been great,” Lieber said. “I mostly love coming to art shows and being able to talk about art. So that’s my favorite part about it. People walking in saying ‘this just makes me happy.’ So that’s what I love about the art fair. That and the community of artists. Everybody’s very kind and generous to each other.”
In an interview with The Daily, Lawal Said, State Street fair painter, said she felt the thoughtfulness of the organizers was a large part of building community at the event.
“The (organizers) here really care about artists,” Said said. “They’ll make sure artists are doing well. They’ll come along and say ‘do you need a seat or to go on break?’ They will feed the artists. They’re really genuinely concerned about that.”
Wearable textile artist Kate Beck, located in the Ann Arbor Street Art Fair, told The Daily in an interview she was grateful for the nice weather this year.
“The weather was wonderful this year,” Beck said. “In general, the weather is usually the biggest challenge here. Otherwise, it’s really run very well, very well organized.”
Daily Staff Reporter can be reached at lyrawild@umich.edu.
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