I am incredibly excited to be invited to participate in Art Fair on the Square in Madison, WI this weekend as an emerging artist. This is a huge show that I have been attending as an art lover for years so to be afforded this opportunity is a huge honor.
Since I had never done an art fair before and most of my art is rather large and heavy, I needed to come up with stands for my tent that could handle the weight but were easy to setup. I researched various options and came across this article in Popular Woodworking for building art stands out of plywood so I once again turned to my hubby and his formidable wood shop to create a variation on this theme.
I was afraid that 7 ft tall panels would be too top heavy for an outdoor show so we created seven 4 ft panels instead and then drilled holes in the top of the panels to slide a section of garden fencing into so each of my display panels ended up being 6.5 ft tall and 3 ft wide.

Each stand has removable legs and the fencing detaches so these are very easy to stack in the back of the truck. The plywood is pre-drilled with holes so screws can be placed in multiple locations and I have s-hooks for hanging my animal heads from the fencing.
I decided to do a test setup in a couple of different configurations to make sure that everything was going to fit ok. The Art Fair has very specific rules about not having any art outside of the 10×10 footprint and there will be tents on both sides of me so I had to come up with a configuration that displayed pretty much everything inside the tent.




I am very happy with the results from the test run. It was quite windy on the day that I did this and I had no problems. Here is hoping that I come home next weekend with a relatively empty tent!