New York based Artists & Fleas creates weekly markets where emerging artists, designers, vintage collectors, and handmade crafters can set up shop and come in direct contact with the consumer public. Established in 2003 in Williamsburg Brooklyn, Artists & Fleas has created unique destinations for the community of artisans, collectors and cool-hunters to come together in a dynamic, vital retail setting where buyers and sellers can meet from around the world. Their current markets include the Indoor Artists & Designer Market, the Vintage Market, and the Market in McCarren.
Learn more about the A&F story or Become a New vendor with Artists & Flea
- The A & F Indoor Artist & Designer Market is located at 129 N 6th St and is open Saturdays and Sundays from 12-8pm. Map
“Established in 2003, Artists & Fleas Indoor Market is a weekly Williamsburg Brooklyn market where emerging and independent artists, designers, collectors and DIYers can showcase their wares, set up shop and meet their market and a unique destination where consumers can interact and buy directly from the source. Located in a large warehouse in the heart of Williamsburg’s North Side, Artists & Fleas has helped create a vibrant and dynamic environment for the community of local artists, designers and collectors eager to come in contact with the general public brings and vice versa. It’s an experience - where the thrill of discovering something new, unique or different happens every week. It’s a pop-up shop, a rotating store-front, a carnival to delight the senses. It’s a place where resources, ideas and merchandise are constantly changing hands. New vendors are always welcome (http://www.artistsandfleas.com/artists_fleas/become-a-vendor.html).”
- The Vintage Market is located next door to the current Artists & Fleas Indoor Market is open Saturdays and Sundays from 12-8pm. Map
“The Vintage Market at Artists & Fleas, is a new market showcasing 16 local vintage collectors and dealers and their collections of furniture, clothing, housewares and decor, accessories and more. The Vintage Market is our first significant expansion effort and represents the fulfillment of a long-time desire that was carefully and steadily fed by hundreds of customers and vendors over the year … the desire to have a space within a broader collective of vintage vendors in the heart of one of New York City’s most vintage-obsessed neighborhoods. We’re thrilled to be doing it. So there you have it: it’s a pop-up shop for you and 15 new great friends and your stellar collections on the 2 busiest shopping days of the week - bang - in the heart of Williamsburg’s North Side.”
- The Market in McCarren is open Saturdays from 10am-6pm and is located in the North end of McCarren Park, adjacent to the McCarren Field.
“A weekly outdoor independent artist and designer market in Brooklyn’s McCarren Park in partnership with the Open Space Alliance of North Brooklyn (OSA. The Market in McCarren features independent designers of clothing, jewelry, accessories and handmade crafts and will include an array of traditional and non-traditional visual artists.The Market also includes a cafe with organic, locally produced food, highlight community non-profit partners and provide a variety of entertainment and themed weekend activities.”
2 years ago
>> AVO Feature >> Artist market >> Artists and Fleas >> Brooklyn >> Indoor Artist Market >> Market in McCarren >> New York >> The Vintage Market >> Williamsburg >> designer market >> flea market >> indoor market >> AVO Writes
Written by: John Babbott
Photos by: Jeff Hall
Bring your two dollars and get to the market at Bunumbu for all your perennial needs as a resident bush dweller. I’ve never been any place in the world where you can get more for less. The equivalent of a dollar loads you up with a pile of sixty-two plumped up oranges, spackled orange and green and sweet, the closest thing to candy available besides pineapple. The pineapples, grown on mountainsides in plots, are cutely alien when they’re young, grotesquely adorable little spikeballs that turn into beautiful monstrosities when they’re ready to be chomped.
Greasy plastic sacs of groundnut paste, i.e. peanuts ground up into natural peanut butter to use in sauces or on bread, palm oil rendered from the berrylike palm fruit that’s used in sauces, cooking or lamps and is the vermillion blood that sustains the diets and economy of the region, multicolored hot peppers, gaunt and nondescript fish shedding their silverleaf scales, their eyes bugging dryly in the blistering heat, nervous, clucking chickens swaddled in plastic bags with their heads sticking out, their eggs in bowls, soft baby goats bleating at the ends of their ropes, Mende rice (nut-brown rice, thick husked and nutritious, but make sure to learn how to sift the rocks out first, the only dentist in the area exists 40 miles away in a four-by-four foot shack, his marketing scheme is a sign that reads ‘DENTIST’) heaped dusty and cool in pilfered burlap sacks that read ‘USAID’ or ‘A Gift From The People Of Germany’ or whatever denomination of dead-ended aid effort gave a lucky or savvy family 50 kilos of rice, the bags now doling out the Mende variety for 400 Leones a cup (about 13 cents), engorged yellow grapefruit (ask for ‘grapes’), mangos if they’re in season, sweet papaya with their little caper seeds, the split fruit smelling like a groin but tasting, well, like papaya, little sweet yellow onions, dessicated husks of flaking white-flour bread in baskets, long cassava root gnarled and earth-encrusted like the severed fingers of giant gardeners, bulbous yams laid out on mats and blankets, low-grade iron pots and lids, spoons, knives, machetes and hoes, water pans, buckets, and the miasma of color that’s the swirl of it all.
With the dust, heat, hawking and haggling and tugging towards different stalls, it’s like taking a drink from a fire hose. Which is roughly equivalent to the experience of living in the jungle in Sierra Leone. Thirsty as hell and the only way to quench it is to take too much – in going to a market, any market, you see the end-of-the-line evidence of what it means to live in and to know a place. Two dollars for a weeks’ groceries – the reason for this can’t be encapsulated except through an understanding of the local economy, the debt cycle that keeps the farmers (a farm, by the way, looks like untamed jungle to someone who doesn’t know any better…the corn fields of Nebraska and Kansas are distant cousins to the hills of Joki at the very closest…they don’t know each other) at starvation level while produce buyers receive their crops in return for paltry loans that further the serf-like system of dependence and exploitation. The flies covering the bread, the pot-bellied little kids with intestinal worms, the scrabble for survival and subsistence evidenced by this end-of-the-earth improvisation of commerce – can’t be understood fully from any one source, not through a UNESCO report or a firsthand account, and not even fully by going there oneself.
But look for a moment at Jeff’s face, the dewy Pumoi (Mende word for ‘white guy’) Peace Corps newbie looking at his camera in the middle of the market at the crossroads at Bunumbu, and look at the kid to the right checking Jeff out, trying to figure how this strange being got to his neighborhood, and you can see a bit of the bewildered acquiescence that is the slow comprehension of a place more different than you could ever imagine.
Going to this market, it will change your life. To change the lives of the people who live there, go to http://www.tc.umn.edu/~jewel001/SierraLeone/
2 years ago with 1 note
>> AVO Article >> AVO Writes >> Bunumbu >> Jeff Hall >> John Babbott >> Kailahun District >> Kpege West Chiefdom >> Sierra Leone >> article >> market culture
Written by: Brittany Kleinman
Photo by: Brittany Kleinman
Last fall, I took a trip to the Union Square Greenmarket in New York City to learn more about one of America’s most successful Farmer’s Market program – organized by The Council on the Environment of NYC (CENYC). They’re dedicated to improving New York City’s environment and have been doing it for over thirty years. CENYC uses markets as a way to enrich the community and provide greener, safer, and stronger neighborhoods. As a result, Greenmarket has become the largest farmers market program in the United States.
From Greenmarket’s website:
“Greenmarket promotes regional agriculture and ensures a continuing supply of fresh, local produce for New Yorkers. Greenmarket has organized and managed open-air farmers markets in NYC since 1976. Greenmarket supports farmers and preserves farmland for the future by providing regional small family farmers with opportunities to sell their fruits, vegetables and other farm products to New Yorkers.”
“Eating locally grown food is nothing new. A hundred years ago, over 95% of Americans lived on farms. City dwellers ate food brought by horse and cart from nearby farms. In the 1800s, Brooklyn was the top producing agricultural county in the US. In the 20th century, farms moved west and many local farms were paved over. By the 1970s, New Yorkers complained of brown lettuce and hard tomatoes while local farms went bankrupt. Greenmarket was a natural solution to a two-fold problem: by selling their homegrown crops in New York City, local farms could stay in business and bring fresh food to city neighborhoods. What began with twelve farmers in an empty lot in 1976 has grown into the largest network of its kind in the country, with rigorous “grow-your-own” standards.”
Originally written for WEJETSET
2 years ago
>> AVO Article >> AVO Original >> AVO Writes >> CENYC >> Greenmarket >> NYC >> USA >> market culture >> new york city >> wejetset >> farmers markets >> farmers market
Written by: Brittany Kleinman
Photo by: Brittany Kleinman
Drifting though residential alleyways topped with laundry canopies, birds tickle your ears with song as you near one of Hong Kong’s greatest marketplaces. The Bird Market is a unique cultural hobby where birds are bought and sold not for their appearance, but for their voice. Typically popular with older men, they gather early in the morning to share their songsters with fellow friends. Much like westerners taking their dogs out for walks, men will promenade with their prized bird around the plaza stopping to exchange stories along the way.
Stretched among 70 stalls, feathered beauties from Australia to East Africa display their rainbow coats and choir-like voices. As you stroll throughout the stalls, ornate bamboo cages hang over your head as porcelain feeding dishes call to your fingertips and live crickets await their destiny. Click Read More for additional information and photos.
Located along Yuen Po Street, the garden was built to replace the old, maze-like Bird Market, which was closed down during the worst Bird Flu outbreaks. Despite the remnants of warning signs at a few market stalls, the government reopened the market when the flu was no longer a threat.
To hear Hong Kong’s songbirds, get off at Prince Edward MTR Station and take exit B1. Walk East along Prince Edwards Road and turn left onto Sai Yee Street. Make a right onto Flower Market Road and walk to the end of the street. The market is typically active from 10am to 6pm.
Originally written for WEJETSET
2 years ago
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