Hello – last night I attended a RAW Arts showcase as a guest. Before going to the showcase I did a bunch of reading online about peoples experiences, and I thought it might be good to contribute to the research of other artists by writing one of my own. You know, give back to the artists community in that way? So this post is geared at fellow artists, particularly artists who are thinking about accepting an invitation to a RAW event.
I’m super wrecked though, I’m just, massively tired. Doing events takes a lot out of me, and I had to be ‘up’ and ‘active’ all night, not to mention all the preparing for it, and I’m a mess of a human being so thats all a lot harder than it should be. :p
Given this, this is only going to be a pretty brief description.
Okay, so, I live in Brisbane, Australia. I’m under the impression that in the US (and maybe other countries I don’t know) that there are like, awards for various categories, and as far as I could tell like you could win little regional awards and also like, bigger awards for larger areas, or something like that? I don’t know. None of that exists here in the Australian version.
So. One of the elements of a RAW showcase is that you need to sell a number of tickets to get in to the show. If you don’t manage to sell the tickets you have to pay the difference yourself. In reading about peoples experiences online this was seen as one of the major negatives.
Here in Brisbane the deal is to sell 20 tickets at $20 each. 20 is a lot, and I could see a lot of people struggling to get to that number. I personally had a pretty good time of it, I have a number of amazing friends and all my tickets sold out, and I started directing my friends to buy tickets on behalf of my neighbor: Art By Elicia
However, I was able to sell tickets due to a combination of my friends being amazing, and my circumstances working well on my behalf. I’ve never really done anything like this, and essentially it was my debut as an aspiring career artist. My friends are aware that this isn’t a hobby for me, that I’m very serious about making this my career, and know my circumstances enough to know how important it was to me.
Had I been… less obviously deeply personally invested in my art being my career, had I been a little further on my path, were this not my first event that everyone knew how important it was to me? I probably would have had a much harder time. I mean. 20 is a lot!
So, on the experience. I’ve not done anything like this before. I’d like to do things like attend regular markets, but I have not done that sort of thing. So this was like a practice run, setting up a stall, doing the display. A housemate and the parents of another housemate helped me set up my display, which was excellent of them, and we uhh, ran out of time. Even with the help I didn’t get everything up that I’d wanted to. So, this lets me know about how I need to plan my time in preparation for events. Essentially I need to factor in a lot more of it.
Anyway. I was pre-warned both by people who had attended events in Brisbane, and from my reading that the space would be very dark and to bring extra lighting. So I did that, and it helped a lot! I really think the lights helped my display a bunch. I could justify buying them because I also want to do night-time and twilight markets into the future, so, lights -are- going to be something I’ll need anyway. They were relatively pricey though, the setup in general was relatively pricey.
Excluding a $9 sheet of fabric that I intended to poke holes into, everything from my setup could be used again at future market stalls, and that was comforting.
On sales: It was not a good venue for sales, not for me, and not for anyone really, so much as I could tell. I sold 3 pairs of $5 earrings to strangers, and one pricier bracelet to a friend. When I finally got a chance to walk around and talk to the other vendors they’d ask me how my sales were ans I told them I’d sold 3 pairs of $5 earrings, and they’d laugh and say they were in a similar sort of boat. The audience really did seem to be the friends and family of starving artists. 😛
One woman who seemed…. more…. put together? A bit more established than many? Said that that was fine, these sorts of things are more marketing events than sales events.
I did give away quite a large stack of business cards, and got some strangers to sign up to my mailing list. (the first people ever to sign up to my mailing list, given my website hasn’t been publicized to strangers until the event last night hahaha.)
On the atmosphere, super nice, super fun, super friendly. Everyone was great. I didn’t actually have a lot of a chance to network and meet my fellow artists because I was a bit too consumed with manning my stall? But everyone I talked to, I mean, pretty much everyone, was super great. Very nice. I did manage to find a few artists whose work I thought meshed well with mine, and talked about maybe doing some collaborative work. We’ll see if anything comes from that, that’d be nice. 🙂
I had a good time. I might do it again if I didn’t have to sell tickets, given that I now have all of the stuff I need to do the set up. I wouldn’t feel comfortable trying to sell tickets again though, from where I’m sitting it was so wonderful and such a great feeling of support that my friends purchased tickets for me, but, they’ve already shown their support by doing that, and by doing countless other actions and displays of support, that I’d feel -really- weird and uncomfortable if I were to try and ask anyone to buy tickets for me another time!
I might go again as an attendee, it was a good fun time, it really was my jam, but I’m not sure I’d go again as a vendor. Which isn’t to say that I regret the experience at all, I don’t. I’m super glad I did it. It gave me a lot of confidence, a lot of practice talking about my work, and I think really helped me personally in a lot of ways.
I’ll likely write a second post with more reflections. I want to ask my friends and supporters what they thought of the event generally, not just my work and supporting me and all that jazz.
Have a good week everyone.
