AAF is the place for new and established collectors to discover and buy paintings, drawings, sculptures, video, photography and limited edition prints from distinguished galleries, all priced from $100 - $5000. This year the Fair will host more than 60 galleries with approximately a quarter of the exhibitors from Europe, Canada and South America.

Kettle cookin'

by Mike Daniel - Dallas Morning News

Rangey artist-run Deep Ellum gallery space Kettle Art has been chosen as one of 65 galleries to participate in the Affordable Art Fair Contemporary Art Fair on June 14-17 at the Metropolitan Pavilion and Altman Building in Manhattan. Yep, that's New York City: Oz for gallerists and artists alike.

Landing the spot (some 1,000 spaces applied globally) is quite a coup for Kettle, which is staging a fire sale-like "buy, sell, trade" group show through June 2. It'll be the only Texas gallery represented at the fourth annual event, which is an outgrowth of a similar successful annual fair in Bristol, England. According to director Frank Campagna, most of the space's staff and member artists are making the trip.

And this is what went down...

Well we came we saw and we conquered. New York City, the Big Apple, the city that never sleeps and the city that's seen and done it all... This is one tough place to get any reaction in at all. 9-11, Lennon getting shot, Man landing on the Moon and our homies killing JFK are about the only instances I can think of in my lifetime that got any reaction at all.

So here we are the Kettle crew heading up there all naive and whatnot going into our first art fair, together as a unit, damn near family and as individualists, w/ our heads held high and our art as strong as we could muster. This was good, very good indeed. Out of approximately 1,000 galleries that applied, 65 - 70 were accepted, including us, the only gallery from Texas. Every other gallery showed up w/ few if any artists at all, only gallery reps and really slick works from around the world. Here we are a dozen strong, all hyped up and ready to kill or party with anyone / everyone that'd try and keep up. So that's basically what we did.

We stood out. This can be both a positive and negative thing but we were definately not your run of the mill, generic, nonobjective, canvas gallery. I can not tell you how many times we were told we had the coolest or were the best gallery in the show. We also overheard we had evil / fearful art too, so I assume we made an impression. Above that we put the 'affordable' in the Affordable Art Fair. This deal was advertised as original pieces of art from $100 - $10,000, but we were the only ones w/ all our art under $1,000. We ended up selling around 25 pieces total... Not enough to break even but enough to do it again and consider this the cost of an education.

We learned plenty about presentation. Every other gallery had nice, clean, slick offerings hung at eye level, that could be exchanged for another piece when one sold. We hung ours 'salon style' from floor to ceiling, featuring about 75 pieces in one fell swoop. In other words it was overwhelming. Now this is the norm for Kettle Art in Deep Ellum because we take pride in offering tons of art at reasonable rates, but obviously not normal for this scene. Whatever, we took lots of mental notes and will really be ready next time around.

The best part of the trip was we got much tighter w/ one another and made plenty of new friends as well. Big time thanks to my Kettle Art business partner Kirk, who had the foresight to see this as a new frontier for us. As gallery owners we see it as an utmost imporatnce to promote and nurture our artists on to higher levels. This is obviously the next learning curve and we are prepared to take on this mission. Also huge thanks to artists Richard Ross, Sergio Garcia, Havi Frost, Mark Nelson, Judith Lea Perkins and Erica Felicella for attending and busting ass along w/ us in this venture. Special thanks go out to Alison, Monica and Johno for being there to assist, support and drink lots of alcohol along w/ the rest of the crew. Honorable mentions go out to Marie Sena and Cathey Miller as representing Kettle via their work but unfortunatelty missing the trip of a lifetime. Things could not have gone any smoother if we had paid or prayed for it. No damages or incidents, just passion for what we were doing.

As artists, I know we are all looking forward to creating on a higher realm and doing this again. Guaranteed, the next time we take a field trip like this, our new found knowledge and skills will be exercised in full force. Afterall, being 'the little gallery that could' is one hell of a title to live up to.

Note - many of us took the time to document what we did.

So far, Richard has done the best right here.

Check it out!

Here's a link to the AAF site for more info...

Affordable Art Fair 2007

Kettle Art page on the AAF Site

return to previous