Preparing for Art Fair

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.

Home built 3 x 4 ft plywood art display stands painted black with detachable feet and pre-drilled holes with 30 x 36 in garden fence section inserted into the top #artdisplay
Plywood and garden fencing art display stands

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.

Art fair tent setup
Outside of tent
Inside 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!

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