Imagine the thrill Imelda Marcos might receive if she were to find herself in a designer-shoe outlet the size of several football fields.
I know that thrill.My shoe outlet came in the form of an American Craft Council wholesale market held in Baltimore last February.
The ACC is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to the support of quality contemporary crafts. To that end, it publishes a bimonthly magazine, American Craft, and holds 11 annual craft shows and markets. The shows are open to the public, but the markets are open only to retailers who come to place orders for their galleries and stores.
The first ACC show was held in Stowe, Vt., in 1966, and 175 artists participated. The Baltimore show I attended featured approximately 1,100 jury-selected exhibitors. That is the equivalent of the Utah Arts Festival times 11. It took me seven hours to breeze through the show.
At first, I was overwhelmed just to be there and see so many excellent crafts. But the longer I walked around, the more questions started entering my head. Questions like, how do the organizers choose who gets in? How well are these artists doing? How did they get started? Is this their
only occupation?
I put such questions out of my mind until a month later when I met Ben Behunin, one of the owners of Sugar Post Pottery Inc. Behunin mentioned that he and his business partner, Fred Conlon, were hoping to get into the Sarasota, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C., ACC shows.
Behunin has applied to both the Park City and Utah Arts Festivals for four years straight; this is the first year he has been accepted to the Utah fest.
And it surprises me. Not that he finally got in but that he hasn't before now.
The quality of his pottery is equal to anyone else's I have seen in past festivals. But if he has had that tough a time getting into a local festival, what are his chances of getting into a national show? And what hoops will he have to jump through?
Enter the beauty of e-mail and the Internet.
From the ACC's Web site www.craftcouncil.org, I found background information, application forms detailing the process and the e-mail address of the show's organizers. A day later I had the information I wanted.
Based on last year's numbers, the show expects approximately 1,400 applicants to compete for 375 available booths. About 20 percent of the applicants have never been exhibited at an ACC show before. Selection committees made up of both craft artists and retailers will judge five color slides from each applicant. The slides are awarded point values. Once the final scores are tabulated, each entrant with the 375 highest scores wins a spot. Those who come close will be placed on a waiting list. Others will be rejected.
Deb Fleck-Stabley knows this process well. She has been involved in ACC shows since 1987. And getting into a show one year will not guarantee that you will be in the next.
Some years, Fleck-Stabley has been rejected; others, she has been placed on the waiting list. According to her, the waiting list is almost worse than outright rejection. On the waiting list there is the possibility of someone canceling, which would allow her into the show. Because of that possibility, she must prepare the same as if she was accepted. Then she waits and hopes that the hard work will pay off.
This year, the hard work paid off.
Fleck-Stabley's handbuilt earthenware clay forms are one-of-a-kind. She uses slabs and coils to build the unique forms and decorates them with underglazes, glazes, special-effects glazes and typically fires them twice. Her wonderfully bizarre figures are bright, amusing, sometimes useful as well as decorative (vases, candlesticks, etc.), and time-consuming. She doesn't have assistants helping her produce her work the way many artists do. She doesn't use slip casts for mass production.
And her style isn't middle of the road. Fleck-Stabley's work doesn't appeal to everyone, and yet she sold out on the first day of the three-day Baltimore show. That means she took enough orders from galleries to keep busy for the the rest of 2000.
Having a show go as well as this one meant Fleck-Stabley gets to spend more time at home with her family and less time on the road doing other shows.
I was pleased to see an artist doing so well when her work is so out-of-the-ordinary. But I was disappointed that a local outlet like Q St. Contemporary Fine Crafts didn't get to the show in time to place an order.
In fact, I probably would have bought enough all by myself to fill the required minimum purchase.
I'm sure, however, that with 1,100 exhibitors to choose from, Q Street picked up at least one or two new artists whose work with delight me . . . and there's always next year.
You can reach Heather Tuttle by e-mail at heather@desnews.com