The finished attic of a Fairhope home was, for one Fairhope kid, something better than a playroom: an art room with no rules. Elisabeth Hays painted the walls, tracked glitter everywhere, and — by her own description — looked like a paint bomb had gone off. That attic is a fair origin story for a career that has since stretched from a downtown Fairhope fabric shop to gallery walls across the South, and in 2024 it came full circle when the Fairhope Arts and Crafts Festival selected Hays as its featured artist for the 72nd annual festival, March 15 through 17, under the theme “Fairhope in Bloom.”
“I was thrilled and honored to be selected,” Hays said at the time. “When Marissa Thetford, this year’s chairperson, told me last summer that the theme is Fairhope in Bloom, I immediately thought of the tulip beds throughout the town in spring.”
The featured painting anchored the festival’s promotional universe — the commemorative poster, T-shirts, and limited-edition signed and numbered prints sold at the official merchandise booth downtown. And her full collection of tulip-inspired paintings went on display at Lyons Share Gallery, 330 De La Mare Avenue, beginning with the First Friday Art Walk on March 1 and remaining up through festival weekend.
A Fairhope story with deep roots
Hays was born in Alexander City, Alabama. Her father died when she was eighteen months old, and her mother moved the family to Fairhope soon after — the beginning of a life on Mobile Bay that continues into the next generation. She graduated from Fairhope High School in 2005 and studied fine arts at Auburn University, crediting a childhood of art camps and encouraging teachers with building the confidence that a creative career requires.
Hers is also a family story entwined with the festival itself: she and festival chairman Marissa Thetford have known each other since childhood, growing up together in Fairhope — and Thetford later said she couldn’t imagine a more perfect artist to represent the town. Hays’s children, Sam and Mary Crider, have grown up with that same artistic backdrop — during festival season they posed beside their mother’s mural on De La Mare Avenue, a short walk from Lyons Share Gallery. The family rounds out with a Golden Retriever named Grits and a household calendar built around the bay.
Halfway through college, Hays went to work for Tricia Niemeyer, then a Fairhope interior designer who owned a fabric shop called Tricia’s. The mentorship covered more than design. “She mentored me and taught me so much about design and business,” Hays has said. In 2010, Hays bought the store, renamed it LuLu & Me, and ran it for eight years, focusing on custom home interiors and new-construction design — “custom draperies, furniture, bedding, lighting, finishes, and such.”
In 2018, with her second child on the way and her husband, William Hays, a partner at luxury custom builder Pitman Brown Building Co., she sold the downtown store to raise her young children. The pause didn’t take. She channeled her energy into her own art — and, that same year, organized the first Little Art Mart at Little Point Clear, the event venue on Scenic 98 that Niemeyer had opened. The curated market gathered about a dozen “makers and merchants” — paintings, ceramics, jewelry, monogrammed linens — and drew more than 500 shoppers across a three-day weekend. It was the first time Hays showed her own art publicly, and the market became a spring and holiday tradition for several years.
Butterflies and mixed media
As her painting practice matured, one subject emerged as a signature: butterflies. Hays works in mixed media — papers, layered paint, graphite, pastels, and wire — giving the creatures a sculptural presence. “I started making butterflies about four years ago and they’ve sort of become my signature subject,” she has said. “Their natural beauty and the transformative nature that they represent have always intrigued me. I don’t know that I’ll ever tire of them and the endless possibilities of pattern and palettes.”
Her current collections lean expressionist and abstract, merging a love of textiles with a love of painting — a natural extension of the fabric-shop years. Today her work hangs in galleries around the South: Lyons Share in downtown Fairhope, Ashland Gallery in Mobile, Palette Home in Richmond, Virginia, and Shain Gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina, along with representation by the online Well + Wonder Artist Collective. She also operates from an office at 200 Fairhope Avenue with a showroom called The Front Room, where she hosts pop-up shops and small gatherings — including a spring 2024 event with her lifelong friend Allie Haynes Nielsen of Andalusia, whose Vine+Branch preserved-floral vessels Hays recruited for a butterflies-and-flowers pairing. “They aren’t your grandmother’s dried hydrangeas,” Hays said of the arrangements. “They’re just really beautiful!”
The festival and the town that made it
The Fairhope Arts and Crafts Festival, which chose Hays as its 2024 featured artist, is one of the Southeast’s marquee art events — and one of the country’s most competitive. Since 1952, the juried festival has drawn artists and crowds to downtown Fairhope each March; it has ranked among the top ten festivals in the nation in Sunshine Artist Magazine’s rankings, draws crowds estimated in the hundreds of thousands over its three days, and fields more than 500 artist applications for roughly 200 booth spaces. The festival’s featured artist tradition — the selection that appears on posters, shirts, and signed prints — has been called as popular as the rings at a wedding.
For Hays, the honor landed at a pivot point in her working life. After selling LuLu & Me in 2018 to raise her children, Sam and Mary Crider, she spent several years as the neighborhood’s pop-up hostess and a steadily growing gallery artist. The featured-artist selection gave her momentum: “Before, I’d paint three to four days in a row and then put the brushes down for a bit and focus on design projects,” she said. “The Arts and Crafts event has inspired me. I’m in a good place. I’m growing as an artist and getting my feet back into interior design.”
Giving back through art
Hays’s community work runs through the same creative channels. She has worked closely with the Thomas Hospital Foundation’s annual Grand Summer Ball, serving as its featured artist in 2022 — her butterflies inspired the ball’s theme and decor — and co-chairing the 2023 gala with Codi Dearing. That year helped the foundation post one of its highest-grossing results, with proceeds directed to expanding the hospital’s cardiac care facilities, one of the region’s leading heart units. She also curated and hosted the Little Art Mart annually for several years, giving other makers the same first-stage she once needed.
The gallery circuit has been the other engine of her professional life. Her work is carried by galleries throughout the South — Lyons Share in downtown Fairhope, Ashland Gallery in Mobile, Palette Home in Richmond, Virginia, and Shain Gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina — along with representation through the online Well + Wonder Artist Collective. She speaks about the gallery world with a newcomer’s appreciation even now: as a relatively new professional artist just a few years ago, having Lyons Share showcase her work, she says, was deeply encouraging and taught her the ins and outs of being a gallery artist — from pricing and presentation to the rhythms of shows and collections. Her recent collections continue to explore expressionist abstraction in mixed media, merging textiles with paint, a vocabulary she has been building since her fabric-shop days.
Her reflections on Fairhope’s growth carry both nostalgia and gratitude. “It’s exploded!” she has said — recalling a childhood when the arrival of a Wendy’s qualified as big news. “I very much appreciate how we’ve preserved the downtown and sense of community along with our wonderful schools. I am so grateful that the town’s growth has provided an opportunity for the expansion of community treasures such as FEEF’s Pelican’s Nest and Thomas Hospital Foundation.”
These days, Hays splits her time between the easel and a renewed interior design practice — taking on clients again now that her children’s schedules at Fairhope West Elementary are more predictable. “I love it,” she says of the return to design. The through-line from that glitter-coated attic to a festival poster seen by hundreds of thousands of people is, in her telling, a matter of luck and location: “Fairhope has been the perfect small town to live in. I grew up on Mobile Bay and am now raising my kids on the bay. Our days and weekends are filled with crab traps, cast nets, boat rides and sunsets. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else!”