Why Seattle is seeing more people of color-centric arts and crafts markets

The Saturday sun beat down on Cre Claytor as she stood at a booth along 20th Avenue in the Central District. She offered up samples of cannabis-infused popcorn and chatted about the honey she sells, produced by bees in her backyard. Nearby, a man sketched faces on canvas with decisive pen strokes. A vendor selling body-shaped candles exclaimed again and again how much she loves markets like this.

As shoppers perused the offerings up and down the street, Claytor said Books, Bites, n’ Beats, a block party/festival, “feels like home.” To her, the new festival celebrating Black culture, which took place July 29 and 30, represents a change in the opportunities available to vendors of color who sell at local craft markets.

“This summer has been one like none other in terms of opportunities for folks like us,” Claytor said. “It’s been tremendous, almost overwhelming.”

In recent years, local vendors and craft market organizers say they’ve seen more and more markets run by and designed for people of color pop up around the Seattle area, from Yes, Ma! Night Market in Beacon Hill to the Black Night Market in Tacoma. These markets — where small business owners often sell arts and crafts items like pottery, paintings and jewelry — offer community as well as opportunity for vendors who don’t always feel welcome elsewhere.

Local markets frequently fail to be representative of Seattle’s diversity, according to Mari Griffin, the founder and operator of the recurring Black Night Market. Griffin said she’s been to several where only 2-4% of vendors are Black.

In her eyes, people of color-centric markets provide opportunities for vendors and attendees alike that marginalized communities don’t always receive. Many have also taken strides to make vending more accessible by reducing or eliminating vendor fees. Those fees — money that vendors pay to sell at a given market — often go toward advertising, renting space for the market, compensation for organizers and more.

But funding the markets remains an issue for some organizers. So now, organizers are experimenting with different tactics, from grants to community fundraising, to make their markets viable.

Creating space for community

By fall 2021, Jennifer Liu had heard the concerns again and again: “I was the only person of color” at a market, a friend might say. “It seemed like the organizers talked to everyone but me.”

Then came a breaking point: She saw yet another local market announce a lineup without many vendors of color. Liu thought, “Why don’t we have other markets?” Then she decided, “I could do it.”

In less than two weeks, she threw together the first Rain Or Shine Community Market in October 2021, creating a space in Phinney Ridge that explicitly prioritizes people of color and reduces the vendor fee to lessen barriers to entry. Since then, Liu’s seen more and more people start their own markets too.

“These big expensive markets that used to be the only thing available — that’s like $400 [in vendor fees], and really hard to get into, even if you could afford it,” Liu said. “And so I think people are just taking matters into their own hands and trying to create what they want to see.”

Many shoppers have become more cognizant of where they spend their money following the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, Liu and other organizers said. Especially as people moved out of pandemic restrictions, they’re “engaging with smaller vendors, … people of color, LGBTQIA+ owned,” according to Seattle University professor James Miles, whose areas of expertise include art and art education.

Beyond economic opportunity, fairs centered on communities of color also provide something less tangible: a feeling of safety and camaraderie. That was always the goal for Renata Bryant and Mattie Mooney, two of the co-founders of Taking B(l)ack Pride, an annual festival with a vendor market meant for queer and trans Black and Indigenous people, as well as other people of color.

“This is a place where you don’t have to code switch, and you don’t have to look over your shoulder for who’s watching,” Mooney said. “And you don’t have to feel like you have to show up in any other way but authentically, because the space is truly meant for you.”

As people of color-centric markets proliferate, some organizers are inspiring others. For example, Sam Mejia — the artist behind The LadyWookiee Shop — sold pottery, earrings, journals, totebags and zines at Rain Or Shine in May. Liu and other market-organizing friends gave them the courage to start the repeating Accessibility for All Artists Market in Tacoma, a space for disabled vendors.

Markets like these can serve as a stepping stone for marginalized and newer vendors, Mejia said, especially since they often charge lower vendor fees. At established craft markets in Seattle, those fees can rise above $400 (though markets like Urban Craft Uprising, one of the largest in the area, do offer scholarships for some vendors).

“My limit tends to be about like $75 for how much I’m able to pay for a vendor fee, and I know that that’s definitely on the lower side of what most people pay,” Mejia said. “But realistically with where I am … I can’t really charge more, so I can’t justify paying more.”

And when markets set their vendor fees low, local potter Ryan Allen McDonald pointed out, artists might also be able to set prices lower — making the experience more affordable all around.

Searching for sustainability

But low vendor fees aren’t always easy for organizers to set or maintain.

Gracie Santos Guce faced that issue the first time she hosted The Palengke National, a Filipino-centric market, with co-founder Jennifer Marie Johnson. They began by setting the vendor fee for the June 2022 Rainier Beach market low: $25. But with such limited revenue, they ended up paying for T-shirts, marketing and more out of pocket.

So when Guce and Johnson began planning the next Palengke that fall, they set the price higher: $150. While Guce thinks the change might have chilled the number of vendors who apply to the ongoing market, she also said the ones who do participate generally perform well.

Guce and Johnson, like many small market organizers, started Palengke by identifying a location to host and then reaching out to vendors they knew. (Organizers also frequently put a vendor application online and do a social media callout.) While some groups like Yes, Ma! Night Market are fiscally sponsored by nonprofits, meaning the sponsor can accept donations and grants on behalf of the market, many rely on vendor fees.

Griffin, the Black Night Market operator, runs markets full-time. An experienced organizer, she said she typically charges vendors $135 (or $125 if they have business licenses) — money that goes toward expenses like booking a venue, paying performers and compensation for her own work. She doesn’t always profit from BNM.

But between organizing her own markets and offering services to other organizations and festivals, the model is sustainable enough, she said: “I’m able to live off of … the work that I do.”

That’s not always the case for organizers. Ellise Uyema and Kaining Wang, co-chairs of the regular Makers Art Market in West Seattle, said their $90 vendor fee — with payment plans and a scholarship available to make participation more accessible — just barely covers the venue rental. Stretched thin, Uyema said they’re taking a short break at the moment.

Likewise, Liu at Rain Or Shine has faced funding issues. When the market ended up short on funds, she’s turned to the community for donations. At some point in the future, though, Liu said she probably will need to make money.

Lack of compensation affects the “sustainability of making sure that we can keep going and not burn out,” she said.

Even when organizers turn to outside funds for their events, compensation isn’t always easy to come by. For example, Taking B(l)ack Pride costs about $200,000 a year to produce, the founders said. They find the funds to cover the large festival and charge vendors nothing, but the organizers themselves are rarely compensated for the work they do.

“We are the last to get paid if there’s any money left over,” Mooney said. “Oftentimes, there isn’t much.”

Experimenting with new models

Yes, Ma! Night Market began in April 2022 when Joanne Cha and Kryse Panis Martin set up pop-ups to sell plants and ice cream at The Station, the coffee shop Leona Moore-Rodriguez owns on Beacon Hill.

But the market, which works to uplift people of color and queer folks and is fiscally sponsored by nonprofit A Sacred Passing, truly grew after the co-creators won a grant from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture. That money enabled Yes, Ma! to move to a larger space, pay the organizers for their labor — and most unusually, give vendors a stipend for attending ($150 for their August market, Cha said).

“We know that a lot of these markets, they have to ask for vendor fees,” Moore-Rodriguez said. “And our goal was to not have anybody have to pay to vend. We want you to make money.”

Yes, Ma!’s model remains fairly unusual: Vendor Yes Segura of Smash the Box, who sells Seattle neighborhood map art, said he’s only ever heard of two other markets in the area that pay their vendors. Moving forward, though, organizers like Liu said they hope to emulate the approach. And as more new craft fairs pop up, many are experimenting with their own ways to uplift increasing numbers of local artists while becoming more sustainable for organizers.

“I think sustainability needs permanency,” Miles, the Seattle University professor, said. “Converting unused spaces, particularly downtown, into retail event spaces could also benefit the local economy and these pop-up maker space, maker markets, too.”

That’s the model that Rya Wu adopted after opening the Uptown art gallery The Fishbowl in April 2023 as a mecca for queer and trans creatives of color. She started hosting monthly markets there in May, and kept vendor fees relatively low, at $40 for most markets.

Hosting a regular market in the same space each month allows people to “feel like they have a second home base,” Wu said.

However, “if it weren’t for the pandemic, The Fishbowl definitely would not be possible,” Wu said. “If we were paying market rate for the space, we could not be there.”

Stephanie Morales, organizer of Books, Bites, n’ Beats, has hosted smaller markets before. But she’s also faced funding woes. So to expand for the festival this July, she and collaborator Kristina Clark turned to a $10,000 grant they received through Seattle’s Neighborhood Recovery Fund.

The duo still charged a vendor fee, but Morales said they were able to set it reasonably low, at $50 a day. Morales said she hopes to get to a place where she, like the Yes, Ma! organizers, can pay her vendors.

Having been on both sides of the fence — vendor and organizer — Morales sees markets that center people of color as critical. The events diversify the products sold at craft markets and help vendors build connections, she said.

“Even though I am an independent artist, I say I have co-workers. I see my friends — or people that have become my friends — at all the markets,” Morales said. “So it also allows me to form community. I don’t necessarily get that at … more white-majority markets.”