Downtown Fairhope will once again transform into an open-air gallery this weekend as the Fairhope Arts & Crafts Festival marks its 67th year, drawing more than 200 juried artists from two dozen states along with an expected crowd in the hundreds of thousands.
The three-day festival, one of the longest-running events of its kind on the Gulf Coast, is a juried show, meaning every exhibitor was selected anonymously by a panel of organizers from a pool of more than 600 applications. Accepted artists compete for more than $20,000 in cash prizes, including a “Best of Show” award, 11 individual category awards and an “award of distinction” in each of 11 categories: fibers, functional crafts, graphics, drawing and watercolors, jewelry, mixed media, painting, photography, pottery and ceramics, sculpture, and wood and fine crafts. This year’s judging panel includes Donna Cunningham Hawes, Erin McIntosh and Heather Ashworth.
Organizers with the Fairhope Arts & Crafts Festival Foundation, which has served as the event’s primary sponsor for the past three years, say the show typically comes together over many months. Applications open in July, a jury reviews the submissions in October, and accepted artists are notified in November, giving the foundation the winter to finalize logistics before the festival returns each spring. City police are expected to close downtown streets to traffic Thursday evening as artists begin setting up their booths, turning the heart of Fairhope into what volunteers describe as a temporary village stretching across downtown.
Among the artists making their first appearance this year is Steven Meadows, a mixed-media artist from Palestine, Illinois, who transforms discarded lawn chairs, bicycles, wagon wheels and other found objects into sculptural fish and expressive faces. A former general contractor and wholesale woodcarver, Meadows said he stumbled into the style almost by accident, assembling a wood-carved fish covered in bottle caps and nails before friends encouraged him to take the work more seriously. He now travels to eight or 10 shows a year and said he had heard for years that the Fairhope festival was among the best in the country before finally earning a jury spot after being wait-listed the previous year.
Glass artist Heidi Barron, who splits her time between Michigan and the art-show circuit, is returning to Fairhope after enjoying last year’s event enough to route herself back through Alabama from another show in Florida. Barron, who has built fused-glass bowls, vases and sculptures since her hobby turned into a career in the 1980s, said the quality of buyers and the town itself are what keep artists coming back. She said most exhibitors ultimately depend on show sales for their livelihood, and that Fairhope has developed a reputation among traveling artists as a reliable “sellers’ show” when the weather cooperates.
Not every artist at the festival is from out of town. Forty-six of this year’s exhibitors are Alabama residents, including nearly a dozen from Baldwin County. Fairhope painter Loran Chavez, a former professional seamstress who once made costumes for local theater productions, turned to acrylic painting after being injured in a drunk-driving crash in 1993. She said picking up a brush helped her work through pain and tension in her arms and shoulders, and her marine-life paintings, set in shadow box frames built by her husband, have become a festival staple since her first show at the National Shrimp Festival in Gulf Shores. Because Fairhope is her hometown, Chavez said she can host visiting artist friends and keep her overhead low while selling to a following of repeat customers who look for her booth every year.
The festival’s reach extends beyond Fairhope’s downtown core. The Eastern Shore Art Center is simultaneously hosting its 47th annual Outdoor Art Show along the festival’s northern border, featuring roughly 125 additional artists along Oak, Equality and Section streets. Proceeds from the Arts & Crafts Festival benefit the Fairhope Arts & Crafts Festival Foundation’s scholarship and grant programs, which organizers say have distributed more than $42,000 to date, including three $1,500 scholarships awarded annually to graduating seniors in local high school art departments. Past grant recipients have included the Baldwin Pops, the Eastern Shore Art Center, the Eastern Shore Choral Society and the Exceptional Foundation.
Each year the foundation also commissions a featured artist to design the festival’s official artwork, used on marketing materials, posters and T-shirts. This year’s featured artist is Gigi Hackford, a longtime Fairhope-area painter known for seascapes, landscapes and acrylic work often displayed at the Fairhope Artist Gallery on Section Street. Hackford’s festival piece, a painting of a wooden sailboat titled “Homeward Bound,” will be available for purchase at the festival’s merchandise booth.
Beyond the art itself, the festival will feature more than 18 food vendors, with a main food court centered near the Festival Stage on Magnolia Avenue between Section and Bancroft streets. The stage, located next to Regions Bank, will host 18 musical acts throughout the weekend, ranging from area school bands and choruses to the Zuraka Belly Dancers of Mobile and the Gypsy Pearl Band. Admission to the festival grounds is free, though parking downtown is limited. Organizers are encouraging visitors to use a $5 shuttle service operated by the Baldwin Regional Transit System, which will run from the Plantation Pointe Shopping Center, Eastern Shore Village and Volanta Park, dropping riders at Johnson Avenue and Bancroft Street, a short walk from the festival.
Several ancillary events will run alongside the main festival, including the Spring Fever Chase 5K on Saturday morning and pet adoption events hosted by the Baldwin Humane Society and The Haven. Saturday evening will bring the Twilight Music Festival, a ticketed $30 event hosted by the Rileigh and Raylee Angel Ride Foundation featuring performances by Ross Newell of the Mulligan Brothers and by the Red Clay Strays at the Halstead Amphitheater on the campus of Coastal Alabama Community College. Families with younger children can also visit a dedicated children’s area near the K-1 Center and Fairhopers Community Park.
Festival organizers credit the show’s staying power to the support of the city of Fairhope, the Downtown Merchants Association and the volunteers who help stage the event each year. While attendance fluctuates with the weather, organizers say the Eastern Shore Chamber of Commerce estimates roughly 200,000 visitors attend annually, a figure reflected in the fact that most Baldwin County hotels are typically booked solid for festival weekend.
Fairhope, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, has cultivated an arts identity for more than a century. The city was founded in 1894 as a single-tax experiment on land purchased by the Fairhope Industrial Association, and its downtown remains anchored by the pier, the rose gardens and a thriving gallery scene along Section Street. The Eastern Shore Art Center, founded in 1955, operates the half-century-old Outdoor Art Show that runs in parallel with the larger festival each spring.
The festival’s reach into surrounding Baldwin County communities is part of what makes the annual event a regional economic driver. Hotels in Fairhope, Daphne, Spanish Fort and Gulf Shores typically fill for festival weekend, and restaurants across the Eastern Shore prepare for one of their heaviest weekends of the spring. Local tourism officials estimate the festival and its affiliated events together generate tens of millions of dollars in direct and indirect spending.
Juried arts festivals rely on the discipline of an anonymous selection process to maintain quality. The Fairhope jury reviews applications without artist names attached, working from images and artist statements to decide which submissions best fit the show’s standards across the 11 medium categories. The arrangement protects the festival’s reputation among traveling artists, many of whom plan their annual show calendars years in advance.
The featured-artist program gives a single Fairhope-area artist the spotlight each year through the festival’s poster, T-shirt and marketing materials. The tradition connects the festival’s commercial machinery to the local artistic community and provides a notable line on the resume of the artist chosen. Past featured artists have included painters, sculptors and ceramicists working in styles that range from representational coastal scenes to abstract mixed media.
The Eastern Shore Art Center, founded in 1955, operates from a historic building on Section Street in downtown Fairhope and serves as a year-round home for exhibitions, classes and community arts programming. Its annual Outdoor Art Show, now in its 47th year, runs in tandem with the larger Arts and Crafts Festival and adds roughly 125 additional artists along Oak, Equality and Section streets, expanding the footprint of the spring art weekend.
Festival scholarship and grant programs funded by the Fairhope Arts and Crafts Festival Foundation have distributed more than $42,000 to local art students, schools and arts organizations since the foundation’s formal sponsorship of the festival began. Three $1,500 scholarships awarded annually to graduating seniors in local high school art departments have supported dozens of students pursuing further study in visual arts and design.
Festival weekend also brings the Eastern Shore Chamber of Commerce’s annual estimate of roughly 200,000 visitors to the area, a figure that has helped establish the festival as one of the largest art events on the Gulf Coast. Most Baldwin County hotels typically fill for the weekend, and local restaurants prepare for one of their busiest weekends of the spring. The festival’s economic impact, while not formally measured every year, is widely cited by city and county officials as evidence that the arts economy in Fairhope is a meaningful driver of Baldwin County tourism.