Art! Vancouver: An International Art Fair Comes to Vancouver Next May

    VANCOUVER, BC, September 20, 2014 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Toronto has four commercial art fairs where, depending on the fair, artists and/or galleries can sell their work directly to the public.

Yet despite Vancouver's reputation as a city with an abundance of artists, no similar art fair has so far been able to establish itself in the city.

Lisa Wolfin is hoping to change that.

She's the founder of Art! Vancouver which will take place at the Vancouver Convention Centre East Building from May 21, to 24, 2015.

"Why don't we have an art fair yet? It is like anything else: someone has to do it," she said by phone.

"We're bombarded with applications worldwide. We're getting people signing up from all over the place."

Wolfin said she isn't limiting Art! Vancouver to either galleries or artists - she wants both.

Wolfin is refreshingly clear about what Art! Vancouver is all about: "It's geared toward selling."

Even though the focus of the fair is on commerce and bringing artists together with gallerists and designers, Wolfin said Art! Vancouver doesn't accept every artist who applies. Each applicant goes through an assessment by a four-member jury to see if it qualifies as fine art. So paintings, photographs, sculptures, mixed-media and other mediums are okay but not crafted works - and no dolls.

"This is fine art," she said. "You can't judge the content but you can judge the quality."

Wolfin's background includes working for two years at Christian Dior in Paris as an apprentice. She worked in wedding gowns and evening wear and the sewing room where, she was told, she would learn how everything is made from the inside out.

It's an indication of her street smarts that she got the job without knowing more than high school French. She survived in the atelier by making a bilingual friend and studying at night the words and phrases she'd heard at work during the day.

When she returned to the west coast, she started Wear Wolfin Designs, a women's clothing company. Her big success came when she launched a line of painted bustiers at the same time Madonna was wearing Jean Paul Gaultier bustiers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Wolfin also made high fashion bustiers covered in Swarovski crystals for Holt Renfrew and La Vie en Rose.

But after her success with the bustiers, Wolfin took a break from the fashion world and focussed on raising her children.

It was only years later that she became an art entrepreneur. As a member of the Hollyburn Country Club, she noticed the club had lots of empty walls.

"I remember walking around the club and thinking: 'What a waste of space,'" she said. "I wrote a proposal to them: 'You can make money off your walls.'"

Five years ago she turned the walls of the club into an art gallery where she sold paintings including her own work. Now the club has about 100 paintings that are changed every two months.

Ideas started percolating again about two years ago when her husband starting working in Toronto. She decided to coordinate her visits with the city's three art fairs: Art Toronto, Toronto Art Expo and The Artist Project: Contemporary Art Fair. (It was recently announced that a fourth art fair is taking place in Toronto: Feature: Contemporary Art Fair 2014.)

"Somewhere along the way, I thought I should do one here," Wolfin said.

Entrepreneurs have tried to set up art fairs before in Vancouver. The biggest was ART 97 Vancouver International Art Exhibition. The inaugural fair made a big splash at the Trade and Convention Centre with 44 galleries from 17 countries.

An attendance of 30,000 to 60,000 was expected but only 10,000 turned up. In its second and final year, the number of galleries dropped to 40.

After two art fairs in Vancouver, founder Linel Rebenchuk tried again in Toronto with Art Toronto. Toronto's bigger collector base has made it a success: it has grown into the country's premiere art fair since 2000.

In 2011, there was another, much smaller art fair called The Fair: International Contemporary Art in Vancouver. It had the distinction of being held in a unique location: art 'booths' were rooms in the Waldorf Hotel during its brief hip period.

Of course, Vancouver has the highly successful Eastside Culture Crawl. Geared to reflect the creative community of the east side of Vancouver, it has a heavy emphasis on craft. The Crawl is also in numerous locations rather than one centralized venue like contemporary art fairs.

Art! Vancouver is produced by Market Edge Media. Tickets are $15 in advance, $20 at the door.

Deadline for artist and gallery applications for Art! Vancouver is Saturday, Nov. 1.

*Image shows the booths and people at an earlier Art Toronto, the country's biggest annual art fair. The booth in the foreground is Bau-Xi of Vancouver and Toronto. Handout photo by Tom Sandler.

For regular Art Seen updates, follow me on Twitter @KevinCGriffin

# # #