Close-up: Ste­phan­ie Man­ass­eh is a Cana­di­an liv­ing in Bel­gi­um since 8 years. She start­ed Acces­si­ble Art Fair five years ago. Ini­tial­ly her idea was to bring togeth­er expat art­ists and expat vis­it­ors in Brus­sels and thus give paint­ers the oppor­tu­ni­ty to show their works but also to for­eign­ers liv­ing in Bel­gi­um to buy from expat art­ists. Since then it expand­ed and the fair attracts Bel­gian and inter­na­tion­al peo­ple in terms of art­ists and vis­it­ors. In the end of Sep­tem­ber, Acces­si­ble Art Fair was held in Brus­sels Con­rad Hotel.

 

- How did the con­cept of Acces­si­ble Art Fairs become a suc­cess?

- I saw a niche mar­ket with­in the expat com­mu­ni­ty because the peo­ple had the spend­ing pow­er, the edu­ca­tion, inter­est to buy works of art but they didn't nec­es­sa­ri­ly go from the neigh­bour­hoods where the Com­mis­sion is to gal­ler­ies and oth­er art fair to buy art. So I thought why not bring the art to them. For the first time I organ­ised it at rue Frois­sart just by the Com­mis­sion in a train­ing cen­tre hall. There we had nine art­ists exhib­it­ing and we had about 200 vis­it­ors. It was quite small but quite suc­cess­ful for the first time. The sec­ond time we had 30 art­ists and we attract­ed about 1000 peo­ple. But I real­ised that there is a poten­tial for Bel­gians as well to come and buy art work direct­ly from the art­ist because not every­body has enough time to vis­it gal­ler­ies, so I brought them under one roof in a week­end. They can buy it and take it home and hang it up imme­di­ate­ly. Our con­cept is instead of put­ting the red dot when a work is paid and ask the cli­ent to wait until the show is over they can take it with them right away. Peo­ple see it as first come, first served.

- What is the main mes­sage of this cre­a­tive plat­form?

- The mes­sage is that art­ists need a nice place to show their works and peo­ple like a nice place to go to and we need to make art acces­si­ble to every­body. We have works for €80 but we have such for €10,000, so there is some­thing for every budg­et.

- How do you make the selec­tion of art­ists?

- We have a small jury and we get about 200 appli­ca­tions for a show. We try not to put too many cri­te­ria because this can block the proc­ess. Of course, we are sup­port­ing art­ists who par­tic­i­pat­ed in pre­vi­ous shows but we also select many new paint­ers. Our require­ment is that the pri­ces of the works have to be less than €10,000 and we make selec­tion between sculp­tures, pho­tog­ra­phy and paint­ings.

- How many young tal­ents got their suc­cess­ful start in art through the fair?

- Actu­al­ly, quite a few. Dur­ing the fair I was talk­ing to an art­ist who had par­tic­i­pat­ed sev­er­al times and now she has a gal­lery that pro­motes her works. But we have a lot of art­ists who are already in gal­ler­ies that still want to par­tic­i­pate at our art show because they want to see the reac­tion of the pub­lic. In the gal­lery you have a ver­niss­age and that's it. Here for three days they can meet a lot of the art lov­ers, speak with them and sell their works direct­ly. We are also very pleased to work with the Mont Blanc com­pa­ny. We have two com­pe­ti­tions - one is the pub­lic choice award. It is on Face­book plat­form where peo­ple can vote for their favour­ite art­ist that par­tic­i­pates at Acces­si­ble Art Fair and we have also a jury prize. At the show the jury choose one art­ist who will par­tic­i­pate next year - a young lady. She will also have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to exhib­it at Mont Blanc's shops around the world and it is real­ly great that Acces­si­ble Art Fair team up with Mont Blanc.

- How does the cri­sis affect now­a­days the art works mar­ket?

- Def­i­nite­ly, there is a dif­fer­ence in the way peo­ple are buy­ing. I think the mid­dle class is a lit­tle bit more reluc­tant to put mon­ey into a work of art so we saw a lot of cheap­er works but we also saw a lot of very expen­sive ones as well. But I think this is going to change, not soon, not tomor­row but the trend will come back.

- What is the role of the col­lect­ors and art lov­ers at the fairs?

- It's real­ly essen­tial.  Just an exam­ple - a big col­lect­or came at the end of the first day when all the art­ists had already gone and he met with me direct­ly. He went around and bought a lot of art works just because he wants to sup­port young tal­ents. So we are get­ting more of that. Peo­ple are invest­ing in young art­ists because they see them as the big ones of the future. The art lov­ers come back, we have cli­ents who are fol­low­ing us from the begin­ning all these five years.

- What's the place of char­i­ty on the fair's agen­da?

- I always try to sup­port a char­i­ty because we have very high vis­i­bil­i­ty with an aver­age of 5,000 vis­it­ors com­ing to our show. This year we gave UNICEF a plat­form to pro­mote their char­i­ty activ­i­ty. Luck­i­ly they had a lot of pho­to­graphs from oth­er events that they had and could sell them, togeth­er with oth­er pro­ducts. So the mon­ey that was gen­er­at­ed from sales of those works went direct­ly to UNICEF.

- Do you have an idea to expand the cir­cle of par­tic­i­pants and to include more art­ists?

- As I said, we have no such strict cri­te­ria and we are open to have art­ists from any­where. In Sep­tem­ber we had an art­ist who came from Esto­nia, for exam­ple. Who­ev­er applies if they have a body of work and they are will­ing to come, they are wel­come to.

- Do you plan to arrange Acces­si­ble Art Fair beyond Bel­gi­um again?

- Yes, we were in Tel Aviv ear­li­er this year and in the week­end of the 26th Octo­ber is com­ing the edi­tion of Acces­si­ble Art fair in Bra­ti­sla­va. So if you are in the area come and meet us and the art­ists at Crown Pla­za Hotel. More than 40 local art­ists will dem­on­strate their works - fine art, pho­tog­ra­phy, graph­ic. We have an idea to arrange soon our show in Lux­em­bourg and Lon­don.