Art Now Fine Art Fair and Craft Is… Market 2025

Last weekend, we caught up with members from the Saskatchewan Craft Council (SCC) and SaskGalleries to talk about the Art Now and Craft Is market!

Creative Saskatchewan is proud to support Art Now and Craft Is as an initiative to make local art and craftsmanship more accessible to the public, and grow the craft and visual arts sector.

Here’s what Alexa Hainsworth from SCC had to say:

“This is the second year that SaskGalleries in the Saskatchewan Craft Council have worked together to organize both an art fair [and a craft market].

So we have a beautiful booth of Saskatchewan Craft artists here as well as you can come and find personal, authentic, beautifully created, one-of-a-kind pieces of fine craft. Bring it to your home or give to others. I think this is a wonderful event. We’ve been doing Wintergreen and Regina for many, many years, but we find that now it’s time to come together and support our local artists here in the province and this is a really fun place to do it.

Thankfully, we are supported by Creative Saskatchewan. They help our artists in various ways, from getting grants so that they can continue their business elsewhere, doing markets and promoting themselves, learning skills on how to run their business and promote themselves as artists. We’re here to do the same. We want to show off the best of Saskatchewan and all it has to offer at the Saskatchewan Craft Council.

We are open on 813 Broadway Ave. We have an online store and we do 6 exhibitions annually as well as we have a fine craft shop where you can come and take some pieces home with you.”

We spoke to Maia Stark about SCC’s travelling exhibition, Dimensions:

“We’ve set up a installation of some of the pieces from our longest running program, Dimensions. Dimensions is a juried sort of competitive exhibition where we have two select jurors choose amongst hundreds of entries 35 pieces that we then do it at different locations and have various programming. We also give out up just over $15,000 in cash awards to artists. So it’s a really great program and we’re very happy to have a selection of the work here at Art Now, our Dimensions program. While our gallery event in Saskatoon is over, we have the entire exhibition on our website, including a virtual tour.

We also have our 50th anniversary exhibition catalog, which you can at our location in Saskatoon. It’s very pretty and has beautiful photographs.”

Learn more about Saskatchewan Craft Council on their website.

We also caught up with Karlie King from SaskGalleries to talk about their involvement with Art Now, and the organization’s 25th Anniversary:

“Art Now is admission by donation, so Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It’s open to the public and it’s important because sometimes maybe there’s a little bit of a barrier for people to go to a gallery, whereas we’re trying to bring the gallery to people and make it as accessible as possible, showcasing different artists with artist talks and demonstrations and and justice, trying to engage people with the commercial fine art industry as much as possible.

It’s the only one of its kind on the prairies. It’s a celebration of the commercial fine art industry. So everyone here is a commercial fine art gallery. There’s hundreds of artists represented by the different commercial art galleries throughout the province. Our members are in Moose Jaw, Regina, Meacham, Fort Qu’Appelle, so yeah, all over the province. We alternate between Regina and Saskatoon every year. So, the numbers fluctuate a little bit, but anywhere from 2 to 3000, we’ll walk through the doors over the course of the three days.

As you can see behind me, it’s 25 years of SaskGalleries. So we’re celebrating that this year. Part of that, we’ve created a calendar as a gift for all the people coming to Art Now. All the galleries will have a calendar as well. There’s an art piece, as you can see from our feature wall, for each one of the galleries that is featured in the calendar. That’s something to celebrate for sure. 25 years.

Saskatchewan has a great artist community and all those artists, all the people at the galleries, the gallery owners, they want to meet people, they want to showcase their artwork. They want to showcase, they want to engage people. They want artwork to be in people’s homes. Having artwork in your home and in your life, if you’ve never had it, it’s hard to explain. And that’s why we have an event like this to encourage it because it’s life changing. It adds it adds a life to to your home, to your office, wherever you’re placing it.”

Learn more about SaskGalleries on their website.

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