Minneapolis Street Art Festival 2024
Summer of 2024, I decided to start a few business ideas to try and take my art to the public on the next level. During this time I had consulted with dear friends on some of the internal challenges I had convinced myself I could not overcome. Things like Marketing and sales were things I had dreaded for a long time, making it difficult for me to break out of my shell. In 2020, I had moved to one of the most popular arts districts in Miami right before what we would now know as the COVID Pandemic, and was working my way up to muster the confidence to show my in this vibrant street art community. I was successful in getting into a gallery showing quite literally the weekend that COVID struck - which ultimately killed my confidence for the next 4 years.
So you can imagine, after this major world event where we were all shuddered in for at least a few years, and unable to enjoy the fruits of life like normal, it took a long time for me to rebuild this level of confidence to get out again. But, after 6 months of joblessness and more than enough time to develop my artwork concepts, I decided it was time to try again. I had been spending the summer thinking about how I was going to translate my collage art onto TShirts, and how to make it a viable canvas. I had tried once before to get my art straight printed on to Tshirts, but the reception from the Street Art community was lack-luster, and the work itself was chalked up to graphic Ts that could be purchased at 5 below. I had a few feedback suggestions to take it to the next level, and so I internalized that and went back to the drawing board. That is how Street Beasts began.
Conceptualizing a series of animal collages in a simple, yet true to my style of vibrant artwork, I decided to scale down my collages from my previously familiar large and grandiose works, and work with some simpler scaled sizes. I developed my first three concepts: a bunny, which became the mascot for the collection (and ultimately became the most popular design), a Cat, and a whale. With the intention of expanding the collection as I went on, I had in mind a Lizard, a Bear, and a Cardinal in the works, but wanted to see if this concept would be well recieved to start.
I created the art, took some cool video timelapses to show the process, then had two of the three finished works printed on Petal Cotton fabrics and sent to me, one yard in each design. When I had the designs printed on the fabric, I scaled them down to get the right size for the shirt, and repeated the pattern so that I could generate multiples out of each yard. Once they printed, shipped, and arrived, it was time to cut the patches out, and get to sewing on blank shirts.
Using some brightly colored thread I had purchased to create my husbands running quilt, and my grandma's 1970's PFAFF german-made sewing machine, I got to work applying the patches to the center chest area of each shirt, making sure each was perfectly aligned and well secured. A few more timelapses and content, and once finished, knew it was time to share with the world. Now came the challenging part.
Seeing as how Minneapolis has a short summer season, I knew it was going to be difficult to try and find a way to stay profitable and get my name out there. Many festival deadlines had already passed by the time I brought this concept to reality, and I was having a hard time connecting with event coordinators due to my own late arrival. I decided to take a leap of faith and just show up at one Street Art Festival, knowing that this was the target market I was looking for. I got some neon poster board, created some signage the night before with just a sharpie, loaded up my pull cart, and shimmied together a few polls to display the shirts on hangers zipped tied to the cart. I was ready, nervous as hell, and willing to endure being turned away if it came to it.
Thankfully my husband was with me to support this wild venture. We arrived onsite, parked the car, and the first thing I did was look for a police officer to try and ask if we could set up near the festival, with the intention to not disrupt the existing exhibition or sellers, but to try and enhance the experience. I was ready to be turned away, but ther ewas no officer to be found. His car remained empty and we waled a few blocks to find him and couldn't. So this looked to me like sign number one to get my butt out there and start selling. We went back to the car, pulled out my makshift market on wheels, and found a spot on a corner street to post up with our fold-out chairs and begin the journey.
Immediately we were approached by a gal visiting from Colorado who chatted with us for a while. As she was talking, the event coordinator approached. Not knowing who he was, I shared with him my pitch, background of the art, and the handmade sewn on nature of my offerings. He was so sweet, let me go through my pitch and then, gently informed me I was supposed to have a permit to be there. The horror and disspapointment set in and I enthusastically told him I tried to get ahold of the event folks but A, was took late in the process, and B, hand't heard back, I tried my luck. I share with him how to took so much courage for me to be there today, and that I was just starting out, with only 27 followers on tiktok. He was so sweet and understanding, looked at my shirts, and decided that they totally enhanced the festival and contrinuted to the vibe. He told me they would allow it and look the other way, and I sighed a huge sigh of relief and graciously thanked him for being so kind to help me out. Little did I know he would be a returning customer later that day.
Throughout the day I got so many folks who came up and loved my work. So many passer-bys who double-took at the designs with curiousity. And Many folks who stopped to purchase the shirts! I was blown away! I went into this thinking that if I sell 1 shirt this day, I would consider it a success. I ended up selling 9! Sold out of popular sizes, and ended up learning so much about the demographic I was targeting, that the entire day was so wildly successful and amazing, that I am still elevated in the clouds! With such a challenging success on line to even create awareness of my work, finding such immediate success in person re-inforced the reality that I really do just need to overcome this fear of getting out there and simply trying.
I want to say a HUGE, HUGE, HUGE thank you to everyone that came to support me! Thank you to the Event Coordinator who saw what I was trying to achieve, and supported my working my way in. Thank you to all the customers and visitors who purchased and shared such positive feedback about my work. Thank you to the City of Minneapolis who allowed me this chance to step outside of my comfort zone, take a leap of faith, and just get out there to do some good ol' fashion in person marketing (a thing I have been fearing for years since before COVID). This huge boost in confidence has left me gleaming at the possibilities, validated that these Tshirt concepts worked the way I thought they might, and totally re-enforce that I should keep going, not to give up, even in this totally tough time in my life being without work. I am so grateful to everyone who allowed me to make this happen, and will never forget this at all!
