Creating art and running a business aren’t necessarily skills that go together. Sometimes they do, but often they don’t.

Folk artists come to the Market with a wide range of business skills. Some artists are members of well-established cooperatives that leverage individual members’ skills to present work at an international level, provide technical training and even offer health benefits. Other artists have developed highly productive businesses and have a keen understanding of how and where to place and sell their art. They might work with a non-profit, an art dealer, an interested individual or on their own. Still other artists are just learning how they can make a sustainable living from their work.

The annual Artist Training Program works with artists at all levels.  This year nearly 55 artists and 30 translators will attend the program in the days leading up to, and including, the Market. Artists share best practices, network and learn from each other. 

The Artist Training Program seeks to provide Market artists with training in entrepreneurship that can be applied in a global marketplace as well as to offer opportunities for cultural and educational exchange between visiting artists and working artists in New Mexico.

Satyanarayan Suthar, Artist Attending the Artist Training Program

The Market offers workshops on pricing, customer service, creative labeling, booth display and design, international sales opportunities, web marketing, technology resources and artist cooperatives.

This year, Theater Grottesco, a Santa Fe-based theater group, will perform a humorous skit on customer service.  Although the take away messages are serious ones about professional service, the skits will explore funny scenarios when customer service went wrong.

The Pricing Workshop, on the other hand, gets artists to roll up their sleeves and work through nitty-gritty financial information in order to determine the best price for their work. Cost of materials, cost of labor, overhead, shipping costs and costs to participate in the Folk Art Market are some of the variables presented in an in-depth pricing worksheet. The ‘science of pricing’ links up with the ‘art of pricing’ in this workshop when pricing experts (owners of local galleries and retail shops) help artists fine tune their prices.

The workshop on Creative Labeling is new this year and helps artists tell their story with their brand, in particular, their label. Each participating artist will receive 100 labels with a photo of their work printed on recycled paper along with their contact information. During the workshop, volunteers interview each artist to help articulate their particular story. Artists then personalize their label, highlighting an aspect of their work – what inspires them, what makes their materials unique, how they learned the craft, etc.  Every artist will go home with a flash drive with all of the workshop materials in electronic form.

In the future, the hope is to include more online tools for artists to communicate with each other both during the days leading up to the Market in Santa Fe and during the year in countries across the globe. The idea is to create a virtual marketplace of ideas where folk art and micro-entrepreneurship come together.

Developing international entrepreneurial skills isn’t the only goal of the Artist Training Program. Heritage and Culture Day, a portion of the training, provides opportunities for cross-cultural exchange.  Artists visit the Museum of International Folk Art, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and the Santa Fe Farmers Market. One group visits Bandelier National Monument to study Native American culture and another group goes to the Santuario de Chimayo to learn about Hispanic culture in northern New Mexico. Artists also participate in workshops with respected local artists making traditional New Mexican folk art like retablo painting, beadwork, straw-weaving and colcha embroidery.

The Training program kicks off with a welcome address in which artists will welcome each other as they would in their home countries, and share a piece of their artwork with each other.  Many artists are deeply moved by the activity, realizing that they are part of a unique global community of artisans.

And that is what helps make the entire Market experience, including the Artist Training Program, so unique. The Market not only helps to create sustainable livelihoods for artists worldwide but it also seeks to provide opportunities for cross-cultural dialogue and exchange.