Craft on the Dirt Circuit: Commerce and Community at a Contemporary Renaissance Festival

Abstract

This article considers the significance of the “dirt circuit,” the cyclical tour of Renaissance Festivals in the eastern US state of Maryland that craft vendors and performers take each year, as a network through which craft community is formed. Through participant research and onsite interviews at the 2021 Maryland Renaissance Festival, I examine how the closed-world structure of the festival offers a sense of continuity and community, as well as an effective means for craftspeople to make a living. The experiences of craftspeople on the dirt circuit reveal the limitations of common perceptions of craft fairs as precarious and amateur spaces. This research reveals a gap in scholarship around the craft fair as a critical site of craft history and outlines how Renaissance Festivals and other craft fairs can be included in wider conversations around craft and knowledge exchange.

Keywords:

• craft fair
• Renaissance Festival
• commerce
• craft vendor
• alternative markets
• community
• counterculture

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Mark Sieve, Call Me Puke: A Life on the Dirt Circuit (Minneapolis, MN: Two Harbors Press, 2009).

2 The history of contemporary Renaissance Festivals begins in 1963 with Ron and Phyllis Patterson opening the Renaissance Pleasure Faire and May Market in Laurel Canyon, California. In 1967, they opened the Northern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire, which took place in August. As these fairs grew in popularity, it was used as a template, and Renaissance-style fairs popped up along the California coast spreading East. Rachel Lee Rubin, Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture (New York: NYU Press, 2012).

3 See: Akycha Surette, “Manoeuvering for Markets: One of a Kind Craft Show and the Professionalization of Canadian Craft,” Journal of Canadian Art History 39–40, no. 2/1 (2018/2019): 122–39; Frances E. Mascia-Lees, “American Beauty: The Middle Class Arts and Crafts Revival in the US,” in Critical Craft: Technology, Globalization, and Capitalism, ed. Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber and Alicia Ory DeNicola (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 57–77; Sarah Warren, “Selling Rhinebeck: Confrontation, Profit, and the ‘Mass-Anxiety Attack’ of the Northeast Craft Fair,” The Journal of Modern Craft 7, no. 2 (July 2014): 141–67; Susan Luckman and Jane Andrew, Craftspeople and Designer Makers in the Contemporary Creative Economy (Berlin: Springer Nature, 2020); Susan Luckman and Nicola Thomas, Craft Communities (London: Bloomsbury, 2024); Susan Luckman and Nicola Thomas, Craft Economies (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

4 Dennis Stevens maps the term “communities of practice” as it relates to the formation and dissolution of craft groups and identities, noting that contemporarily, “their existence is derived primarily from mutual understanding, a common set of practices and a shared sense of legitimacy,” as opposed to the disciplinary boundaries and pedagogical lineages of studio craft. Dennis Stevens, “Validity is in the Eye of the Beholder: Mapping Craft Communities of Practice,” in Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art, ed. Maria Elena Buszek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 43–58.

5 I am using Bernard Herman’s definition of social imaginary—the ways in which participants in large networks of social relationships organize around shared values and beliefs in everyday ways—to inform this language. Bernard L. Herman, “On Southern Things,” Southern Cultures, 23, no. 3 (2017): 7–13.

6 Rubin. Well Met, 4.

7 The idea of the fair as a refuge can be seen in the rhetoric of the fair’s programs and promotional materials: “How many festivals in this country are actually ‘festive’? And how many fairs are more than colorless commercial enterprises? … But must the spirit and real joy of the old fairs and festivals be totally obscured and forgotten? It was with this question in mind that we first conceived the Renaissance Pleasure Faire and May Market in 1963. Perhaps this feeling of true celebration and human involvement was only waiting for an excuse to live again.” “Amid all that surrounds us as 20th century necessity, an age old necessity within all of us awaits its chance to live again…a time for festival celebrations; a time when ‘the pleasures of nature and the naturalness of pleasure’ set the spirit free…if only for a day.” Program for The Pleasure Faire & May Market, South, at Paramount Ranch, Agoura Hills, CA, 1969; Program for The Pleasure Faire & May Market at Haskells Ranch, North Hollywood, CA. KPFK Folio, 1963.

8 Often defined in opposition to industry or as a response to modernism, contemporary conceptions of craft are, as Glenn Adamson claims in The Invention of Craft, founded on a nostalgic and romantic idea of preindustrial work. This romanticization is seen in much of the language surrounding the fair. Liza Williams, reporter for radical underground newspaper The Los Angeles Free Press (which first began at the RPF with support from the organizers) writes, “Come see the reality of things being born, not out of clanking antiseptic machines that have no pride, but from the probing, sensitive fingers of artisans for whom each creation is his pride’s identity. Come to the Pleasure Faire and May Market!” Glenn Adamson, The Invention of Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); Liza Williams, “Come Buy My Magick,” Los Angeles FM & Fine Arts (May 1966): 6–7.

9 In Makers: A History of American Studio Craft, Koplos and Metcalf frame the expansion of craft fairs as an extension of the growing studio craft movement. Many craft fairs, like the RPF, were not explicitly tied to the studio craft movement, though their influence on craft is equally valid. Janet Koplos and Bruce Metcalf, Makers: A History of American Studio Craft (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2010), 308.

10 To understand connections between craft and the counterculture’s various projects that “reimagine something no less than modern society at large” by “reforging modern civilization through individual actions and local practices” see Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner, West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Glenn Adamson, Craft: An American History (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021).

11 Peter Bart, “Madrigals Lull the Bohemians At Faire in California Meadow,” The New York Times (May 9, 1966).

12 Another eighty-five acres surrounding the fairgrounds house a parking lot, vendor campground for tents and RVs, horse field, and some surrounding wooded area.

13 The social imaginary of the Renaissance Festival draws from a romanticized vision of a pre-industrial, pre-slavery, Western past to create it’s idealistic, utopian setting. While it provides a rich space in which to critique contemporary politics, as the early festivals claimed to do, and envision alternative identities and ways of being in the world, it also demands critique for how it centers whiteness, reinscribes racial stereotypes, and promotes harmful ethnic archetypes and tropes. Ambereen Dadabhoy and Nedda Mehdizadeh provide a framework in which to approach this in Anti-Racist Shakespeare. Ambereen Dadabhoy and Nedda Mehdizadeh, Anti-Racist Shakespeare (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

14 Rubin. Well Met, 191.

15 In 1970, RPF organizers Phyllis and Ron Patterson opened the Living History Centre, a non-profit organization and venue available to “artists, performers, craftsmen and students who wish to explore historic methods of executing their crafts while in an authentic environment of the period.” The organization funded craftspeople, students, and scholars through grants and other resources. Later, Phyllis Patterson was consulted on other spaces of immersive and historical interpretation such as California State Parks, Colonial Williamsburg, Plymouth Plantation, and Old Sturbridge Village. “Faire Founders,” Faire History, available athttps://fairehistory.org/pasp-obitfull.html (accessed December 18, 2023).

16 Milon Townsend, interview with author (September 26, 2021).

17 Tommy Carroll, interview with author (March 9, 2022).

18 Hal Kuhns, interview with author (October 7, 2021).

19 Linda Ingram and Molly Lee provide further context regarding the ways in which the autonomy that self-employment through small home-based crafts businesses is deeply connected to life quality, specifically for women and marginalized communities. Linda Jean Ingram, “By Her Own Hand: Crafts, Creativity, Commerce, and Community–Women-Owned, Tourism-Related Craft Businesses in the Verde Valley, Arizona” (PhD diss, Texas A&M University, 2015); Molly Lee, “‘How Will I Sew My Baskets?’: Women Vendors, Market Art, and Incipient Political Activism in Anchorage, Alaska,” American Indian Quarterly 27, no. 3–4 (2003): 583–92.

20 Kuhns, interview (October 7, 2021).

21 Bethany Tussing, interview with author (March 15, 2022).

22 Adamson, Craft: An American History, 376.

23 Ibid., 485.

24 Auther and Lerner, West of Center, xxi.

25 “The only loud complaint raised against the Renaissance Pleasure Faire each fall and spring is that they’ve become too out-and-out commercial no matter how well-intentioned the original concept might’ve been.” Dennis Forbes, “A Renaisance Time Warp in Marin County: ‘The Glove is Up! The Faire is Open!,’” After Dark (September 1974).

26 Stephen Knott describes a similar dismissal of craft learned through the “supplemental education” of night classes which threaten established ideas of how one learns and produces craft. Stephen Knott, “Working Class, Middle Class, Upper Class, Evening Class: Supplementary Education and Craft Instruction, 1889–1939,” The Journal of Modern Craft 7, no. 1 (March 1, 2014): 7–32.

27 The vendor application doesn’t share who is on the jury, but informs the jurying process is “determined by quality of work, existing representation at the show, vendor reputation and the likelihood of the vendor to participate successfully in the show.” “Maryland Renaissance Festival Artisan/Vendor Information and Application,” Maryland Rennaissance Festival, 2024.

28 Gillian Elinor, “Feminism and Craftwork,” Circa 47 (1989), 29.

29 Ibid., 29.

30 Knott, Amateur Craft.

31 Ibid., xi.

32 Ibid., xii.

33 Jenni Sorkin, “Craftlike: The Illusion of Authenticity,” in Nation Building: Crafts and Contemporary American Culture (London: Smithsonian American Art Museum in Association with Bloomsbury, 2015), 85.

34 Ibid.

35 Adamson, Craft: An American History, 162.

36 Warren, “Selling Rhinebeck.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lexie Harvey

Lexie Harvey is a community and event organizer, nonprofit administrator, and independent researcher living outside of Asheville, NC. She holds an MA in Critical Craft Studies from Warren Wilson College. Her research and engagement practices are informed by an interest in personal archives and ephemera, oral history, kinship structures and world-building.