2021 MADE fair dates shift from June to August
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News from handMADE Montana
POLSON — The past year has been anything but predictable. After choosing to cancel all of our 2020 events, handMADE Montana is looking forward, cautiously, to the year ahead. The MADE fairs have become known for their amazing assortment of artists, high quality of handcrafted goods for sale and as a community gathering place. We connect our communities to the creatives that live and produce there. COVID-19 changed how we do business in so many ways.
Our retail store in Polson received a solid amount of traffic during the summer months from tourists looking to bring a Montana-made treasure home. Like many other small retailers, we are thankful for all of the local support during the past holiday season as well. We feature over 80 local and regional artists in the store and recently began expanding our collection of products available online.
It was a difficult decision to cancel the 2020 MADE fairs, and we really felt for the artists who rely on events like ours to make their living. To continue to support and encourage artists in Montana, we focused on curating virtual experiences. We promoted a virtual summer MADE fair event with daily social media round-ups of artists for the month of August 2020 and radio advertisements directing customers to our website. We expanded our artist profiles online and our selection of online products. We also created a virtual map of local retailers in Montana that carry our artists’ work. We invested in professional product photography equipment that we will make available to artists in the coming months.
We cannot yet predict when restrictions will lift for group gatherings and as such have made the prudent decision to shift our Missoula summer MADE fair scheduled for the third weekend in June to Aug. 22 to allow participating artists plenty of time to plan for the change of date. Artists that were juried into the 2020 summer show will be given the opportunity to accept their booth space, fill out the contract and pay their booth fee.
We refunded a majority of the booth fees last year and donated some to the family of artist Emily Mohler’s Go-Fund-Me account. Artists that had applied last year to any of the shows won’t need to reapply to be considered during the jurying process. There is a lot of organizing on our part to make sure no one falls through the cracks.
Applications for our summer show are now live, and all of our events will be updated once we have finalized dates for our fall Bozeman, Helena and Missoula holiday shows. We will endeavor to get you these dates as soon as we can, recognizing the need for our artists to plan their year accordingly. Bear with us as we work with event locations during these tricky and unprecedented times.
To apply, log on to https://handmademontana.submittable.com/submit/183946/2021-missoula-summer-made-fair-artist. The direction on how to apply are available at https://handmademontana.com/pages/applying-summer.
