The wind at the Virginia Beach Boardwalk on Thursday:
My penultimate art festival was this weekend on the boardwalk in Virginia Beach and I’m still recovering.
The MOCA Boardwalk Art Festival is a highly regarded fine art event and I was honored to have been invited to show there. I read reviews and knew the wind, especially in hurricane season/October, would be an issue but I had no frame of reference for how bad it would be and how it would impact setting up my tent.
Didn’t help that I hadn’t slept well the night before (thank goodness for Taylor Swift’s new album that kept me singing and awake the last hour of the drive!) and was alone for this event. I drove down Thursday morning to arrive at the well-oiled machine that is the MOCA volunteers. This was the 69th year of this event and they knew what they were doing! We had a police escort to drive onto the boardwalk to unload. We had 45 minutes before we had to drive off. My plan was to get the tent set up and get everything unloaded and come back to finish setting up.
After 35 minutes I still hadn’t gotten the tent set up and the roof kept blowing off in the wind (nice pedestrians would occasionally stop to try and help me). At the 40 minute mark, I had a bunch of volunteers frantically emptying my minivan into my partially-set up tent so I could drive off the boardwalk (they had waves of cars and everyone had to come and go at the same time).
The one good thing is when I drove off the boardwalk, I found a parking space a block away so didn’t have too far to go when I finally gave up and had to schlep all my paintings and bins and poles and tent and tables and chair back to the minivan.
The view from my wind-ripped zipper on Thursday
Having to strap down my tent to the rented concrete blocks so it wouldn’t blow away made it even harder to get the tent set up straight and the wind blowing so hard twisted the walls and eventually split the zipper at the corner of my tent and bent one tent leg. I was planning to suck it up and set up with the gaping hole from the split zipper but found that I couldn’t close the front zipper (the front door basically) because the tent wasn’t plumb and I couldn’t get any “give” to pull the tent walls closer because of the wind. That’s when I gave up.
After 4 hours battling the wind
The Holiday Inn Express (26th St) was super nice and let me out of my 3-day reservation, possibly because I looked so wind-blown and deranged by that point. Really nice oceanfront room and super comfy bed. Would definitely stay there again.
Post-shower
After a long shower and a big glass of rosé, I felt almost human again and took myself out for a nice seafood dinner (photo was pre-dinner and I wasn’t ready to smile yet!).
I walked the show Friday morning before heading home and saw artists with piles of sand in their tents from the overnight winds. There was a lovely couple from North Carolina in the booth space next to me who were surprised I was lugging everything back to my car on Thursday until I took down my tent and the full force of the wind hit their tent. I saw them Friday morning and they’d been allowed to move into a commercial-grade tent that was already set up; otherwise they would have gone home. The show closed at 2pm Saturday because of the incoming storm (was supposed to run all day Friday-Sunday) and from speaking with artists who stayed to sell on Friday, it wasn’t a profitable event.
So now I have to make some decisions. Weather can make or break an art festival and there are no refunds. This event cost me around $1,000 ($55 application fee, $450 booth fee, $100 concrete weights rental, $50 for mandatory liability insurance, $250 for one night at the hotel [would have been $700+ for 3 nights], gas/mileage driving 200+ miles to/from, meals).
I am going to brute force my tent to work next weekend at my last outdoor event of the season (Stockley Gardens in Norfolk) but if I continue doing art festivals, I will need to buy a new tent, which is thousands of dollars.
Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of options for artists to sell their art other than at art festivals. I had really hoped to apply to the Torpedo Factory in Old Town Alexandria this spring but they cancelled applications for 2025 and likely won’t in 2026 either (and who knows about 2027). Lots to think about before November when I’ll need to start applying to art festivals for 2026.