In case you haven’t been following social media, particularly the Art Fair Review or NAIA Facebook forums (which you should join if you you haven’t already), you’ll find this difficult to believe. Bayou City spring show in Houston’s Memorial Park raised the number of exhibitor booths from 300 to 450, AFTER their application closed and all the artists who had applied thought that they were applying to a show with 300 spaces. This created a storm of comments on the different art show related Facebook forums where artists voiced opinions about the Bayou City show. Less than two weeks before the show (March 28-30), they still hadn’t sent out space locations and artists were worried that they wouldn’t be able to mail their promotional material to their existing customers in time. And then hearing about the increase in booth spaces, a many artists now wanted their booth fee refunded.

Last I heard they are still calling and inviting rejected artists and artists who had applied in the past but not necessarily this year. An artist posted to Facebook that they had been rejected for ten years running and were called to exhibit. Their response was that Bayou City was really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Adding insult to injury, Bayou City sent out an e-mail to all artists who had applied asking them to help clean up the park before the show.

To NAIA’s credit, they sent a letter to the Bayou City board asking for transparency and to offer refunds to all the artists that want out of the show. And to ZAPP’s credit, they are now looking to modify the contract that shows sign to protect artists. After all, when we signed up with ZAPP there was a misrepresentation clause we had to agree with. It only seems fair that the shows have something similar that they have to agree with.

There’s an article about this in the Houston Press.

Here’s a video from a Houston TV station.