The Tucson Gem Shows, 2016 and 2017
John's booth at the gem shows, in photographs from 2016 and 2017, and how one tent beside the Tucson show in 2005 started it all.
Pl. 1 · The booth at the 2016 Gem, Fossil, & Mineral Show.
In 2005, John and his brother shared a small commercial space next to the Tucson Gem & Mineral Show, which he describes in The Artist and the Algorithm as 18 days long with up to 52 exhibitions running at once. Their parking lot touched part of the show, so they set up a tent and put out some art. "I had maybe 10 or 12 pieces at the time," John writes.
When the show was over he added up his materials, time and expenses and found he had about doubled his hourly income. The next year he doubled his inventory, and the result doubled again. In his words:
And just like that, I was hooked. That one show set me on a new path. Within four years, I was doing 18 shows a year.
The long run of the show has its quiet stretches. In the book John remembers sitting in his booth on a slow weekday when a man hurried in and stood beside him, staring at a piece on the wall. He looked at the art, then at John, then back at the art, for long enough that John wondered whether he was shy.
Then, out of nowhere, he looks me square in the eyes and says: “Are you insane!?!?” We both burst out laughing, and just like that… he left my booth as quickly as he entered it. I chuckled about that all day.
Other visitors stay longer. In a later chapter John writes about the intuitive and spiritual people he meets through his art:
I’m blown away by how many I get to meet. Sometimes it’s as many as seven of these gifted people in a single day at a show.
The photographs on John's old site come from two later years. Those titled "2016 Gem, Fossil, & Mineral Show" show the booth inside a large white tent: white walls hung with fish skeletons, crosses and trilobites, a standing figure with one arm raised, a chess set beside a wooden box on a black table, and tables of small creatures and seahorses. A photograph titled "2017 gem show" shows a large trilobite set on top of the booth walls.
The old site also linked two pieces from the press: the Arizona Sonoran News Service story "Artists Shine at the Tucson Gem Show" and a KRAZTV video titled "Some Distant World A Featured Vendor." Its Sculptures page kept a third: a screenshot of an Arizona Daily Star photograph by A.E. Araiza, a close view of the face of Lady of the Woods, which the caption calls "a flat-strap steel statue." The caption places it at the 22nd Street Mineral and Fossil Show during the first weekend of the Tucson Gem, Mineral and Fossil Showcase.
The plates
