A Gallery Hiding in an Event Venue: The Apiary Art Show Comes to Arts and Crafts Weekend
During Fairhope’s Arts and Crafts weekend — the 70-plus-year festival that swells the town of 25,000 with as many as 300,000 visitors — the crowds fill the flower-lined streets with hundreds of outdoor booths. Just a block off the main route, at 85 North Bancroft Street, something different happens: a curated indoor art show inside Apiary, one of the Eastern Shore’s newest event venues, with twenty artists, interior-designer juries, and wine poured among the paintings.
The Apiary Art Show is the work of a partnership between business owner Allison Bebee and artist Camille Cornett, who set out to add a more contemporary, design-driven exhibition to the festival weekend. “We like to host public events,” Bebee says, “and we want to be more than just a private event space.”
The Venue and the Artist
Allison and Daniel Bebee own Apiary on Bancroft Street, the newest addition to a portfolio that includes Gulf Coast Events and Rentals, Belforest Pointe, and Venue 31. The venue typically books weddings and rehearsal dinners — which is exactly why festival weekend was available. “Our venue couldn’t be booked logistically during the festival,” Bebee says, “so this is the perfect use of the space.” The pair tested the public-events concept in November with Holiday Hive, an upscale Christmas market, and the art show extends the idea.
Camille Cornett brings the curatorial side. A mixed-media artist who moved to the coastal area three years ago, she showed her paintings at a home exhibit during the previous year’s festival and was hunting for a venue to rent this time around. “I was looking for a venue to rent this year and reached out to Allison in hopes of booking Apiary,” she says, “and the result is our collaboration to expand on Arts and Crafts, and bring a more contemporary, interior design-driven exhibition to the festival.”
Jury-Selected, Gallery-Caliber
The show’s format borrows deliberately from the gallery world rather than the festival tent. Twenty artists were selected for the indoor exhibition, with pieces chosen by a jury of interior designers and local creatives. The work spans fine art, photography, sculpture, and mixed media, with each artist bringing 25 to 40 pieces — a density of work that turns the venue into something closer to a pop-up gallery than a market. Cornett describes the ambition in three words: “confined and refined.”
The setting reinforces the point. Work hangs in an event venue designed for weddings, which means chandeliers, breathing room, and interiors built to show things off. Wine and cocktails are served. The event is free, open Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and positioned as a calmer alternative to the festival’s bustle — a place to take time rather than cover ground.
Two Louisiana Roots, Two Paths to Fairhope
The organizers share Gulf Coast roots and very different routes. Allison Bebee met her husband at the University of Alabama, where she was a dance major, and moved to his hometown to raise their three daughters — along the way helping build four successful businesses. Camille Cornett graduated from LSU with degrees in fashion and business and began painting when her engineer husband’s work took the family to Tulsa, Oklahoma. A later move for his job brought them to Theodore, where they fell in love with Fairhope and relocated in 2023. Her own work is part of the show.
Both women are part of a visible trend in Fairhope’s art scene: entrepreneurial women building the town’s cultural infrastructure — venues, markets, and exhibitions — alongside the galleries and festivals that have long anchored it. The Apiary Art Show sits squarely in that lane: an interior-design sensibility applied to fine art, in a venue built for celebration.
Why It Matters for the Festival
The Fairhope Arts and Crafts Festival draws hundreds of artists from across the country and ranks among the most-attended events in Alabama, but its street-fair format leaves room for complementary experiences. An indoor, juried show with seating, air conditioning, and a bar gives collectors a place to look at art the way they might in a gallery — and gives visitors a rest stop that still counts as sightseeing.
For the artists, the benefit is a different audience: the designers, homeowners, and collectors who walk a festival but buy in a gallery setting. For Apiary, it is proof of concept that a wedding venue can wear a second hat. And for Fairhope, it is one more reason the third weekend in March has become the artistic high point of the coastal year.
The Apiary is at 85 North Bancroft Street, in the middle of the festival footprint. Whether the show becomes an annual fixture will depend on the same thing that decides everything in Fairhope each spring — the crowds. Early indications suggest art lovers should put it on the calendar now.