Hannah Snesil picked a bizarre venue for her second date with Peter Rorvig: the Bizarre Market inside the Visual Arts Center of Richmond.
“My family’s really hard to buy gifts for in general,” Rorvig said Saturday as he perused the items on the last day of what has become an annual month-long holiday season showcase for central Virginia artists.
He had no shortage of items to choose from, with such choices as a “Richmond” candle with scents of gardenia, fresh tobacco and grapefruit; hot sauce to heat up the taste buds; knit hats to warm the noggin; and artwork inspired by Richmond neighborhoods like the Fan, Church Hill, Manchester and Byrd Park.
By early afternoon, the pop-up at the Visual Arts Center in the Fan enjoyed steady traffic from last-minute Christmas shoppers or folks looking for art to decorate their walls, soothe their soul or tickle a funny bone.
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Judging from the cockroach hair clips, the skull-shaped salt and pepper shakers and the Crocs earrings and Christmas tree ornaments, there was something for everyone.
“We’ve got a bunch of weird stuff in here, honestly,” said Catherine Carson, one of the on-duty “elves” whose artwork was among the handmade items at the pop-up shop.
“It’s just a cool collection of a bunch of different stuff” including jams, candles, ceramics, Christmas ornaments, patches and hats, she said. “So holiday shopping one-stop shop.”
Bizarre Market was founded in 2004 by artist Anna Vanneman, owner of Tiny Space in Church Hill, as a showcase for central Virginia artists. In its second year, she enlisted Bird Cox to come down from Philadelphia to run it.
Initially, the former Chop Suey bookstore hosted the event when the business was located near Virginia Commonwealth University. The market followed Chop Suey to its new location in Carytown. More recently, Cox held Bizarre Market at her Richmond Young Writers space before landing at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond this year.
“If we’re lucky, we will be there for the foreseeable future,” Cox said. “That was just an absolutely magical location for the makers, for me, for the shoppers, and the Visual Arts Center … everybody there seemed to be really happy that it was there. So it was just a very, very lucky stroke.”
Initially, Bizarre Market used all different types of vendors — “a crazy mix of different kinds of things.” But space became an issue and it had to become more selective.
This year’s market accepted 78 artists and turned away about 200 applications, Cox said. “This was the most applicants we’ve ever had.”
“The ‘bizarre’ may not come from the random variety, but it definitely comes from us prioritizing showing off artists who are making surprising, curious, fresh work,” Cox said.
“We have also just some straight-up beautiful things,” she said. “I think the most heavily shopped items are probably the more beautiful and the less bizarre. But we try to still keep it weird.”
