Veteran auction coordinators understand a couple of fudamental truths about how to stage a successful (read: lucrative) event.
One is to keep the wine flowing. Another is to keep overhead low.
And on that front, Saturday evening’s Auction for the Arts has a nearly unprecendented head start, with every piece of the roughly 70 works to be auctioned having been donated in full by the artists.
“People have been unbelievably generous,” said Bainbridge Arts & Crafts Executive Director Susan Jackson. “In a time like today, when the economy is so awful, this is a time when we need people to come through. And they have.”
The auction, which annually benefits BAC along with the Bainbridge Chorale, Bainbridge Island Arts & Humanities Council, and Bainbridge Performing Arts, has gone through various iterations over the years as organizers continually strive to perfect the formula.
Past venues have included Kiana Lodge; last year, the event took place on the green outside BPA.
This year, the festivities will once again be at home, but indoors in the airy but suitably intimate environs of Wing Point Golf & Country Club.
With a long list of past and present BAC artists to draw from, Jackson was well positioned to solicit work for the benefit. The scale and set value of the work spans a range; the silent auction will feature everything from jewelry to woodwork to pottery.
Higher-end pieces by featured artists include paintings, sculpture and wood sculpture by well known island and area artists like Caroline Cooley Browne, Garth Edwards, Beth Moga, Mark Horiuchi, and Gregory Glynn.
She focused on artists she thought would be inclined to be generous, but she also made a point to solicit a range of materials.
“I really made a list of mediums that I thought would be appealing,” she said.
With no single auction coorinator running the show, the auction committee which includes members of each recipient organization, have shared the administrative and planning responsibilities.
“We all have fun working together, and it’s a real collaborative effort. Which is a cool Bainbridge thing,” Jackson said.
