Kimmers sez:

LOVE LOVE LOVE the Art crawl!Big UP!

And after being the Art Car Director and Artistic Director at the Orange Show for the past five years - truly appreciate the art car smooches - but ...

Seriously, "Bayou City Art Festival seems to deal in trinkets and country-themed fare." Have you been lately?

I am the new Executive Director charged with producing both the Downtown and Memorial Festival - and I can say, weather is better for both fests than summer events - we have beer and margaritas mmmmmm!

AND both are top rated national fine art festivals - not a craft or trinket fair in the lot.

With only 300 slots per festival - we get over 900 applications. The jury is held at MFA and this years judges included:

Memorial Park Jurors – 2008

1. Bart Truxillo, ACA Board Member
2. Nancy Kopriva, Artist
3. Adrian de la Cerda, Program Manager, Orange Show Center for Visionary Art
4. Carolyn Rich, Artist
5. Julie Farr, Center for Contemporary Craft, Executive Director
6. Cindi Strauss, Curator, Modern & Contemporary Decorative Arts and Design
7. Sharon Kopriva , Artist
8. Karen Rezai, Booker Lowe Gallery

Bayou City Art Festival Memorial Park is the Number 3 Fine Arts Festival in the nation - and the food and entertainment makes for quite the day!

Where have you been? ;-) Do come out!

As ever, thanks for playing!

Happy Day!

kim stoilis

the only thing is... what about what's on your website? are there any trinkets?



hmm.... any country themed fare?



well I do understand that y'all only let 300 artists in to the festival, but what the fuck do you judge them on? It sure doesn't make sense to me.

Top rated? Is that from AmericanStyle Magazine? I've never heard of it.

and what about the tents and crafts? This just doesn't seem like the way one should present art- it looks worthless piled up on top of itself. No galleries or artist-representatives? You're breaking up the only people who may be able to bring better art to the festival. Relying on who responds to festival open calls means you get festival art and that is a pretty populist group- looking to sell to suburbanites. Charging artists between $575 and $1525 to show in the Bayou City Festival is bullshit too. Buying a booth is for chumps DON'T PAY TO PLAY. There is no reason to subject yourself to the humiliation of "do you have this in teal?" or "honey, this'll look great over the couch."

Is it any better selling in galleries or at festivals (fairs) that are gallery driven? Well, at least you don't have to do the song and dance yourself. The Bayou City Arts Festival is the half-brother of the Westheimer Block Party- both grew out of the Westheimer Art Colony shows in the late 70s and early 80s- but where one has kept up with the conceptual artwork (and totally screwed up the selling part) the other has cornered the market on people driving from Kingwood to buy art with a $20 bill.

I imagine that the Bayou City Art Festival brings money to the city. I don't believe it helps Houston artists. How many of the BCAF artists are from Harris County? Out of that #, how many are doing anything that can be excluded from the bad-abstraction-faux-folk-art-handbags-and-necklaces genre?

The Bayou City Art Festival is neither good for Houston, nor Houston artists. It has no credibility and charges $10 to get in.