Most of the free world has been benefiting in the 21st century from technological gadgets like e-mail, the Internet and Personal Digital Assistants. Now, craft show organizers stand poised to reap benefits as well. New technology is helping promoters streamline the application and jury process for shows, as well as the communication process with exhibitors and vendors.

Why Make Changes?

For Terry Adams, the executive director of the Cherry Creek Arts Festival in Denver, streamlining operations is a top priority in 2004. The Cherry Creek Arts Festival is just three days a year, and Adams works the other 362 days to make sure those 72 hours come together perfectly.

For the 2004 Cherry Creek Arts Festival on July 3-5, Adams and three other staff members sorted through 2,200 applications to winnow their exhibitor list down to 200 artists. That amounts to 11,000 slides from painters, sculptors, photographers and craft artists. Looking at all of them is enjoyable, says Adams, who isn’t so kind when describing the process of organizing the images.

The slides arrive in the mail in their 2,200 envelopes and Adams and his staff sort through them all, ultimately placing them in several slide projectors for viewing. This annual process takes weeks. “I spent nine hours yesterday sitting in a room with three other people, going through them,” says Adams. “You’ve got to stay very focused to make sure that you aren’t mixing up slides and confusing them with another artist’s. With the quantity that we’re sifting through, it’s a huge job to execute that process.”

A couple of states away, Mo Dana has a similar job as executive director of the Des Moines Arts Festival in Iowa. She and her staff sift through 960 applications to find 135 applicants who will go on to exhibit with 15 artists who exhibited the previous year. When Dana began the festival six years ago, they “didn’t know any better,” and the procedure didn’t seem as grueling. But technology has advanced and sifting through slides hasn’t. “It’s been a nightmare,” says Dana. “It’s so archaic and expensive for the artists to develop so many slides and mail them. It takes up an enormous amount of time for all of us. The applications are handwritten and difficult to read.”

The End of Jury Slides

Fortunately, technology is coming to the rescue as early as next year — at least for some juried art shows. Dana and Adams are among an elite cadre of crafts show organizers who are able to offer artists the chance to finally send their applications and their slides via e-mail. (Just in time. For the last few months, the arts show industry has been abuzz with the news that Eastman Kodak is ending its slide projector business in June 2004. They’ll still service existing projectors, but only until 2011.)

But by the second decade of this century, craft promoters will likely have forgotten that they ever used slide projectors. Dana says that 12 of the top art festivals in the country recently banded together — before the Kodak news broke — and decided to enlist the help of WESTAF (Western States Arts Federation), a Denver-based nonprofit organization partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. WESTAF currently is engaged in arts policy research, information-systems development, state arts agency development, and convening arts experts and leaders to address critical issues in the arts. WESTAF’s constituents include the state arts agencies, artists, and arts organizations of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. But, like other regional organizations under the NEA umbrella, WESTAF can help anybody to the east, north and south, and their technology focus will surely benefit art fairs around the country.

Coming Soon, To a Web Site Near You …

By 2005, if you want to apply to a juried festival like Des Moines, Cherry Creek or Ann Arbor, all you’ll have to do is go to an online site and fill out one application, which you’ll be able to send to any or all of the shows. You’ll also be able to bank your slides and then determine which ones you want to send, to whichever venue.

“ Wow,” is the reaction from Jamie Perry of Corona, Calif. An alumnus of the Cherry Creek Arts Festival whose landscape paintings generally sell between $1,000 and $8,000, Perry concedes that it’s difficult to keep up with the application process. “I not only do some outdoor shows, but I do gallery shows, and I’ll be working on a gallery show, and I’ll have to stop and get my slides together, and I’ll have to remember the date to send the application to the outdoor shows,” Perry recites. “It can get hectic.”

And Perry also says that he has missed out on shows simply because he couldn’t find enough time to fill out an application, develop slides and send them out. But once he sets everything up on the new site, he’ll be set. And so will the organizers. Molly Beach, deputy director at WESTAF, says that they plan to license the technology to juried art shows around the country and possibly the world. Ultimately, this type of technology will someday be available to Barbara Pitt. Owner of Heritage Markets based in Carlisle, Pa., Pitt oversees 14 juried art shows in the United States that sell traditional handcrafts to wholesale buyers.

Pitt says the personal computer was the last big technological change for her business and she does have a Web site. The looming absence of Kodak slide projectors doesn’t bother Pitt, since her company’s weapons of choice in a jury are photographs, increasingly taken with digital cameras. She may not run out and embrace technology, but she doesn’t run from it, either. “It’s not second-nature to our industry,” says Pitt. “We’re kind of a hands-on group, but we are getting better at using Web sites to sell our work.”

Thinking Outside The Box

Matthew Saunders, director of technology programs for WESTAF, has some ambitious goals for the arts show world. “This is just pie-in-the-sky thinking, right now,” Saunders says, “but we could envision that during on-site jurying we could have a small wi-fi network, connected to palm devices, and that would allow an on-site juror to streamline their processes. Currently, they go around with a clipboard and we could alleviate a lot of that paperwork.”

Still, some in the art community are a little nervous; for instance, the artists who still don’t have e-mail are going to have to become accustomed to the computers at their library or Kinkos. “For those uncomfortable with computers, there will be new vocabulary to learn and different specifications to understand,” concedes Larry Oliverson, a founding member and past president of the NAIA (National Association of Independent Artists). But Oliverson also says these changes are “inevitable.”

Of being able to send slides and information from one central application to a variety of art shows, “we look forward to it,” says Lynn Whipple of Winter Park, Fla. But the mixed media artist who recently showcased her work at Cherry Creek is cautious about the benefits if judges are eyeing artists’ work on their laptop and not at one central viewing: “The discussion that takes place when judges are gathered is extremely valuable.”

Whipple may be worrying needlessly. “We absolutely do not intend to change the jurying process,” says Adams, speaking for his beloved Cherry Creek Arts Festival. “The chemistry of having those five people sitting in a room together, while the images are projected simultaneously, and for an equal amount of time, is an important piece of the process. But, I think the changes will provide us with a better way of allocating our resources, and it will, in the end, allow us to focus better on our number one constituent — the artist. If we use that time to improve their experience, I think that’s time better spent than sitting in front of a computer, entering data
for weeks.”

Geoff Williams is a free-lance writer based in Loveland, Ohio.