Associate Producer Will Glover sits down with Phil Gilchrist, the Director of the Anton Arts Center in downtown Mt. Clemens about their annual Holiday Market where people can use the arts center’s digital marketplace to purchase works of art from predominantly Southeast Michigan artists.

 

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Will Glover  Give us a little background on what the Anton Arts Center is and what you guys do.

Phil Gilchrist, Director, Anton Arts Center  So the Anton Arts Center is a community-based art center located in downtown Mount Clemens.  We often focus on exhibit programing, we bring in artists from local area, regional area, and showcase their work in a number of gallery spaces that we have here.

Will Glover  Tell us a little bit about what the holiday market is; how long has this been going on?

Phil Gilchrist, Director, Anton Arts Center  We feature artwork from dozens of area artists.  There primarily from southeast Michigan, many of them from Macomb County.  A few of them from further flung locations, but not very many.  And we bring their artwork in and we would usually turn our gallery spaces into sort of this really well stocked holiday shop.  Not specifically all holiday related items, there’s a real wide range of arts and other sorts of craft items that people could purchase from the market.  It’s just a time of year when people often want to spend some money, right?  And making it very easy for the artists, making it very easy for the public, and then also being able to help the artists actually generate income.  And so, as an example, last year’s holiday market effort was able to help artists earn about forty-five thousand dollars.  Which is a really significant amount of money that we were able to pay directly to the artists who made that work.  So beyond just having an opportunity for people to come and shop, this is also a really important opportunity for the community to be able to support artists.

Will Glover  So is it going to be one hundred percent online or is there going to be some in-person aspect to it?

Phil Gilchrist, Director, Anton Arts Center  What we’ve settled on is a primarily online experience.  It was only this summer that we finally launched our art market online, so that people could shop with us at their convenience, rather than having to wait until we were open.  We do have a year-round sort of art market for artists to be able to sell their work on consignment with us, the holiday market being sort of the big time that that happens.  So we already have now established this online platform for sales that we’re going to be capitalizing on for the holiday market.  We are working now on adding quite a bit of inventory for the holiday season, but we have also decided to have very limited in-person shopping on some select Saturdays in late November and December.  So we are finalizing the details for exactly what that’s going to look like right now, and I’m hopeful that by the time this interview airs, we’ll have published those details on our website.