Last November, St. Petersburg City Council member Leslie Curran grew tired of sitting in meetings about how to fix Williams Park. Once a vital center for the community, these days the city block-sized park — in the heart of downtown at First Avenue N. between Third and Fourth streets — is better known as a hub for the homeless. Curran says council debates centered on cosmetic improvements to the park until she posed the question: What about events?
"There's a physical aspect of fixing up the park, but you can't address that until you have some programming in there," Curran says. "It doesn't matter what landscaping or lighting you have, nobody will go into the park if there's not something to do."
She proposed creating a weekly event where local artists and craftspeople could sell their wares — and the mayor agreed, Curran says. Three weeks later, the Saturday Art Market was born. Inspired by the popular Saturday Morning Market of food vendors on Central Avenue, the smaller, art-focused showcase hopes to feed off the larger event and draw residents and tourists a block north to the struggling park.
So far, the concept is working. Now in its fourth month, the Saturday Art Market (or SAM, as participants call it) has attracted a regular group of about two dozen vendors and a small crowd of art shoppers each weekend. Sales have been strong, with one artist selling a painting for $3,500 and another artist selling one for $2,300. A handful of them have been recruited from Interior Motives, the downtown art gallery Curran owns, but many of the artists joined up after hearing about the market through Craigslist or word of mouth.
The result is a hodgepodge of painters, photographers and mixed-media artists, young and old, hawking everything from fine art to inspirational plaques, digitally manipulated photographs, hand-printed greeting cards, jewelry and silk-screened T-shirts. In rows of white tents along the park's winding sidewalks, they constitute an ongoing miniature art festival, not unlike a less formal, smaller version of Mainsail or Gasparilla.
Even for the artists who haven't landed big sales, the market offers a chance to get out and network with other artists and potential clients, says Steven Carpenter. The St. Petersburg artist has brought his brightly colored, surreal oil and acrylic paintings to the market about a half a dozen times and usually spends a good part of the day answering people's questions about his work.
"It's kind of like market research to see what people respond to," he says.
For experienced Etsy.com vendor and downtown resident Coralette Damme, the market provides yet another venue for finding potential buyers for her funky crafts. Since becoming a full-time artist two years ago, she has frequently turned to outdoor festivals as a means of selling stained glass pieces decorated with skulls, linocut cards and stuffed "bi-polar bunny" toys (happy face on one side, sad on the other).
"It's a hard way to make a living," she says.
Yet the Saturday Art Market has suggested to at least one emerging artist that creativity might be a viable source of income. Jerry Smitson, a resident of the nearby Whitney Hotel, approached Curran after one of the markets and shyly introduced himself as an artist. A couple of months later, his sculptures — textured creatures crafted from found pinecones, dried leaves, tree bark, coconut shells and other found materials — are selling for $25-$75 a pop.
Making art, Smitson says, helps him "forget everything else." A neighbor who used to make fun of him for "making a doll" has stopped since he started selling his work at the market.
"He's really come out of his shell," Curran says. "At first he really wouldn't talk to anybody. … now the other day he was in [the gallery], and he was talking to an artist for about an hour."
As for the park's homeless residents, Curran says they have been an aid rather than a nuisance, helping to set up tents and welcoming the presence of the art market. "From the very beginning, they've been helping out. They know the intent was not to clear them out. It wasn't a heavy-handed approach to cleaning up the park," she says. "Those that have been any problem at all have left."
Improvements in the form of better lighting will come eventually to the park courtesy of Progress Energy, Curran says, but for now the challenge is to attract a regular crowd. With performances by the Sunshine City Band slated for Sundays in the park and an increase in the number of family-friendly events like SAM, perhaps perceptions about Williams Park will begin to change and visitors will return.
"First and foremost, there has to be a reason to go into the park," she says.
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2008.