Are you ready to sell your ART at the Downtown Fort Myers Saturday Art Fair?

You have a passion to create and enthusiasm to sell what you create.  You have the inventory required to enter a art or craft fair, the physical stamina and support from your family or friends.  But are you ready to join a retail art and craft fair?  Answer the questions below and see if you are ready to sell your art or craft.

Art Display of Brian Christensen

Bill Hofer - a photography vendor

1. You have sold items you hand-created to your friends.
2. You have given your hand-made items to family and friends; who in turn said they would buy items from you.
3. Your art or craft is well made.
4. You have money put aside for entering a fair, usually around $200.00 to $300.00
5. You enjoy talking about your art.
6. You want to commit your time to producing art and selling it at a fair.
7. You have 50 pieces of art or fine crafts or have the time, money and materials to produce them for a fair.
8. Friends have commissioned pieces of art or fine crafts from you and you have been able to produce the piece to their satisfaction and by the deadline they ask.
9. You can spend 2 to 4 hours at a time, smiling and talking to possible customers.
10. You can take some criticism on your product without getting angry, upset or having your feeling hurt.

If you answered YES to 6 or more of these statements:  

You are ready to get into an art and fine craft fair.

Download the prospectus now and join us the the November 17th for the 

Downtown Fort Myers Saturday Art Fair    Click on download the prospectus now.

If you answered NO to 5 or more statements:

Something is holding you back - look at what you answered no to and try to turn it into a YES.

Remember to sell your work, it has to be good quality, you have to be able to make it regularly, you have to want to sell and talk about your work.  Buyers must like your works as much as you do.  

If you enter an art and fine craft fair and your works are not selling.  

1. You should look at what the other vendors are producing and selling.
2.  Look at the quality of your art or fine craft.
3.  Look at your presentation - presentation of your works is everything!  A great presentation will sell even mediocre art or fine craft.  
4. Make sure that your space is not over crowded, if you made 25 Halloween pumpkin pins - you don't have to place all 25 on the table.  
5. Think in numbers of 3 or 5....this is a pleasing number and makes for better arrangements.  
6. If you have fine art - have an assortment of your best hung and have the rest in browse bins.  

Painted Palm Fronds of  Jean Stanish

Jewelry Creations of Anita Coppolino

ACT Gallery will exhibit Tiite & Kalon Baquero, Jamie Bendola and Tracy Owen-Cullimore in November 2012.

Join Arts for ACT Gallery, located at 2265 First Street in downtown Fort Myers on Friday, November 2, 2012 from 6 to 10 pm for the opening reception and art walk for November 2012.  This month, ACT Gallery will feature “A Quick Recap” a retrospective of culturally significant works from two generations, Artist Tiité Baquero and daughter Kalon Baquero. Father and daughter will transform ACT’s main gallery room into a place of earthy discovery.  The exhibit will be a celebration of Nature, Humanity and the Cultural Innovation.  In a world of chaos and uncertainty, these two artists will bring hope, confidence, and the vigor necessary to overcome the challenges of a modern day world.  Included in this exhibition are the narrative and works of Tiité Baquero’s “Homage to the Orange River Valley, 1982” and “Earth Gallery One, 1990”, histories deeply significant to a critical role for the Arts and to Lee County history itself.  Kalon Baquero will revisit her 2005 Data-A installation “Inappreciable Realities and the Words that Surround Them.”  Gallery visitors will become discoverers of the minute flora and fauna that constitute the environments that in turn, constitute us.  Closer looks at these minute beings reveal an inspiring array of lifestyles, adaptations, and modes of survival that we humans might take great note of in the advancement of our own cultural strategies.  Also featured off the main gallery are Jamie Bendola’s mixed media photographic series “Dead People for Sale to Keep People Alive” proceeds benefit FMCancer, Inc. and Tracy Owen-Cullimore brings her impressionistic paintings of people, pets and more in her wonderfully jewel colored palette. Come downtown for great art and support ACT Gallery and Boutique. 

Tiité Baquero Artist Statement: “The synthesis of my life’s work has been, to give the arts back something that was lost and something that art never had; meaning and a critical function that contains practical utility.  Happily both have been accomplished.”

Tiité Baquero was born in Bogotá Colombia, South America in 1949.  He became an American citizen in 1996.  He managed to survive to the age of 63 this year and is glad to be able to exhibit a lifetime of work, representing a timely contribution to civilization.  Tiité thinks humanity has come to this axis age where the effect of our technological development and the structure of our cultural context is no longer sustainable by any measure or can no longer be obscured by the best creative form of denial. His work is at this time, a viable contribution of what we can do to evolve and gradually replace one current unsustainable cultural strategy.  His life’s work dovetails, in the worldwide Peace Marker Project, which is currently making forward progress to create our specie’s first global work of art.  Baquero completed 52 new works, which bring to the foreground the strength, and maturity of what will be called “Data A” art, a new art form in the context of life.  A mature art form developed from and because of the work of the preceding years.    

Kalon Lucia Baquero was born in Fort Myers, Florida but raised on the island of Kauai, Hawaii.  Kalon has been traversing the landscape where art dances in synchrony with life since an early age.  Her father, Tiité and nature have been her teachers, one forever commenting on and exploring the lessons of the other, always inviting conversation and contemplation on life and art.  Her work have been exhibited in Hawaii and Florida, and recognized by the respective local governments, media outlets, and a wide range of members in both communities.   

Kalon’s Artist Statement: In Kalon’s mind’s eye, she muses on a new era for the Arts; one in which the ingenuity and brilliance of creative minds are applied towards devising solutions to the very real and overwhelming problems that our world currently faces.  She made a conscious decision at age 20 to dedicate her life’s work to the exploration of this possible new era.  Kalon had been creating “seed projects” within the “Data-A Art” of her fathers.  It is her ideal that each of these “seed projects” arouses new collaborations between art and life, humanity and Nature, you and I and us and them.    

Jamie Bendola, two years ago at 25 years old, went into the emergency room.  The doctors found a large mass of fluid in her stomach that was surrounding a tumor on the ovary. She diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Two months later, she went to Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida and had a second staging performed along with a complete abdominal hysterectomy.  During this time, she missed a significant amount of work. If it had not been for financial support from friends she would have lost her car or been evicted from my apartment. Many young cancer patients are not as fortunate. This is why Bendola decided to start a non-profit called FMCancer. 

FMC MISSION: Provide hope, humor, resources and grants to help YOUNG ADULTS both FIGHT cancer and SURVIVE the wrath it can leave behind.

Bendola’s main focus is to provide free resources and yearly grants to young adults with cancer and survivors. FMC is an art based non-profit, with the motto "Live Life Outside The Lines". Her new series entitled "Dead People For Sale To Keep People Alive," is a creative series of enhanced photography featuring mega-celebrities that have died.  Prints will also be available.  

Tracy Owen Cullimore paints in both watercolor and oil, specializing in portraits of animals and people, and she happily does custom commission work.  Tracy is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Liberal Arts with an emphasis in Art History and Economics. Upon graduation, she returned to school to pursue formal training in Advertising and Graphic Design as well as the traditional fine arts.

Tracy is a member and supporter of ACT, the American Impressionists Society, Art League of Fort Myers, The Florida Watercolor Society, The Alliance for the Arts, Fort Myers Beach Art Association, The Portrait and Figure Painters Society of SW Florida and the Sanibel/Captiva Art League.  She was a long time acrylic student of the late Gale Bennett as well as Lucy Macherowski.  She studied oil with national masters: Rose Frantzen, CW Mundy, Quang Ho and Carolyn Anderson and watercolor under Pat Weaver and Janet Rogers.

Tracy enjoys teaching and helping her student's develop their individual styles.  

Cullimore’s Artist’s Statement “As an artist, my mission is to record moments in time with a personal perspective, not a direct reflection as a photograph would replicate. I am not the reporter with a camera, but the artist with a brush.”~ Tracy Owen Cullimore