The Margo Fournier Arts Centre is home to many guilds of many different arts.
To showcase those creations, the Margo Fournier Arts Centre hosted the first ever Guilds Christmas Market on Saturday.
Carrie Ikert helped to put the Market together. She said they wanted to try to build a new Christmas Market to fill a gap after the larger Evergreen Artisans Market.
“There’s so many Guilds and so many talented artists in Prince Albert,” Ikert said. “We’d like to showcase them more so we picked the Guilds that were working out of the Art Centre. We hope to build on this and make it an annual event.”
The Potters Guild, the Rock and Gem Guild, the Weavers Guild and the Photography Guild were all present at Saturday’s market.
Ikert said the concept came from the Pottery Guild after the Arts Centre hosted a Culture Days event.
She said they wanted to show off all of the talented artists but also show what the Margo Fournier Arts Centre has to offer.
“(It’s) just to showcase and bring people back into the Art Centre, especially now (that) it’s renamed the Margo Fournier Arts Centre because no one knows what the Margot Fournier Centre is,” she explained.
“New people coming into town don’t know what this building does. If you just recently moved to Prince Albert, you wouldn’t know the Margot Fournier Centre offers pottery classes and photography classes.”
Ikert said they want to keep growing the event after a successful first year.
“We would like to just keep adding on so it becomes a big yearly event where people can come check out the arts in Prince Albert,” she explained.
The event was in one room on the main floor of the Arts Centre, but they would like to see it expand to the upstairs.
She said most people who came to the sale read about it on the City of Prince Albert events calendar.
“That’s how people found out. We put a sign out there, shared a Facebook post, and hopefully we’ll just continue to draw.”
She said that the crowd was more than they expected with a large contingent after they opened in the morning.
“It was good because we thought we’ll be lucky if we even get four people in the door this year,” Ikert said.
Another goal was to bring people back to Prince Albert’s downtown. In the future, she’d like to expand it to a Christmas Market down Central Avenue.
“We don’t have enough people coming into our downtown area and we want to showcase it,” Ikert said.
“You could grow it. If people know what’s there, then maybe other businesses will join, and so that’s our goal. We’ll see how it goes. Fingers crossed.”
She added that it was nice to have enough people come and take advantage of the sale and believed every artist and guild taking part made a sale.
“I believe everyone sold something which is a good showcase,” Ikert said. “Maybe they’ll talk about it and then they know what’s on the agenda for next year so that’s our goal.”
Michael.oleksyn@paherald.sk.ca
