Monday, December 07, 2009

Sunday, Sunday

Sunday appeared to be the slowest day for most galleries at the fair, and it rained quite hard again.

We sold an Erwin Timmers glass piece to gallerist George Billis, who is also the organizer of the Red Dot fair, then a Sandra Ramos piece to close an otherwise slow day.

One of the key reasons why galleries need to take the huge financial risk involved in attending these art fairs (our booth was over $16,000 by the time one adds up all the details, and that doesn't include travel costs, hotels, staff, food, etc.) is that in addition to exposing the gallery and artwork to more collectors over a weekend than in an entire year in the gallery itself, the fairs also afford the opportunity to expose the artwork to curators.

As we all know, at least in the Greater DC area, our museum curators seldom take the opportunity to visit our local galleries and artists' studios. They do all go to the Miami and other fairs and thus it affords the galleries some precious exposure to them.

To underscore this point, as a result of this fair I am now negotiating the purchase of three original paintings by one of the artists that I represent by the curator of an University museum!

More on that later, once the deal is closed.

At 6PM the fair ended, and soon afterwards an army of worker bees descend upon the floors and begin packing the artwork for shipment back to home base. This is hard work after 4-5 days of working long hours standing on your feet, but by 8:30PM or so I was done and all the art was loaded in my van.

I then drove it to a storage site in Miami Beach, as I'm leaving all the work in Miami and I am returning in January to participate in the Miami International Art Fair, sponsored by Art in America magazine and the New York Times.

Yes friends, next month we get to do it all over again, this time inside the Miami Beach Convention Center.