Backyard Art Fair hits new heights in sixth year

FERNDALE/OAK PARK — The Backyard Art Fair is back for its sixth and biggest year yet in the cities of Ferndale and Oak Park.

The Backyard Art Fair will take place from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, May 10, across 37 homes in the Oakland County cities.

Featuring more than 200 artists, both new and returning, organizer Carey Gustafson said it will be their biggest fair, as last year’s event included 120 artists at 27 homes. Of the participating homes, 23 are located in Ferndale.

“We’re organized, yet this is a really fun grassroots, kind of, ‘Let’s go team, pull it together,’ kind of event,” she said. “It seems like no matter how we try to rein it in, more people want to get involved. So, we kind of just let it happen.”

Every home at the Backyard Art Fair features three or more vendors at each location selling their brands of arts and crafts.

Promoted as the event one can walk, bike, skateboard, scooter or moped to, Gustafson’s favorite part of the fair is seeing all the ways that attendees get together and pull up to each house.

“This is the quirk of it; that is so fun to see how many ways people navigate the show, whether they’re with their bicycling friends, whether they’re just trolling with their neighbor friends, and people get groups of people together,” she said.

Created during the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to gather artists and customers together in an outdoor environment, Gustafson said the fair has snowballed into something that people are discovering every year.

“People come out and artists come out and they’re like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know this existed.’ And truthfully, it’s because just a few of us decided to do it in COVID, and that just spread naturally from people that were coming in and saying, ‘I want to apply or my friend is in your footprint,’’’ she said. “The magic of keeping it in the certain parameters from Eight (Mile) to 10 (Mile) and Scotia to Livernois is, even though there’s more people and more houses and more artists, the sprawl is at least a little bit contained so that people do have an opportunity to hit these different pockets and shop and visit with as many people as they can throughout that day.”

One of this year’s returning artists is Aaron Gaston with his store, Swedish Made Toys, who said he’s excited to be back at the fair and in Ferndale.

“I’ve never been around as many people that just love art and artists and buying their art from them,” he said.

The Dundee-based artist began his career making glass art before he switched to making what he described as “cute and creepy” art.

“It’s lots of eyeballs and teeth and flesh tones and stuff that I feel like some people consider to be a little bit gross, but most people just seem to … gravitate towards it quite a bit,” he said.

Whether it’s eyes sticking out of a Spam container or creepy homemade picture frames, Gaston said his artistic switch allowed him to make his store his full-time job.

“The switch was the thing that I needed to do,” he said. “Before that. I say that I was a glass artist because I made art, but I truly wasn’t able to support myself or my family selling my glass art. And now I’m finally able to … call it my job, and it’s the only thing I’m doing now. So I would say it’s definitely pretty good.

“Obviously stuff like the Spam creatures, and I do one where it’s like Heinz beans, anything that people already have that maybe brand association with or they’ve seen it before, but it’s kind of like a new twist on it, that’s the stuff that definitely people like to see, for sure,” he continued. “It seems like at this point I can’t eat enough Spam to be able to make enough of those.”

If weather forces a cancellation of the event, the rain date is scheduled for May 11. For more information on the fair and a list of participating homes and artists, visit backyardartfair.com.