Mainsail: For your viewing pleasure

By LENNIE BENNETT

Published April 19, 2007

Mainsail Arts Festival sets up this weekend, a temporary village of white vinyl booths sitting at the edge of the downtown waterfront in Vinoy Park. From near and far, 270 artists will come to show their work, hoping for lots of sales. And the possibility of snagging the $10,000 Best in Show award.

They aren't there by chance or luck. The artists you see have been culled from more than 1,000 applicants in a process Mainsail's volunteer organizers have perfected over the course of the event's 32-year history.

"Our only guideline," says Mainsail's chairman Lisa Wells, "is to pick the best."

Wells and her committee of 23 don't select the artists. That's done by a group of five arts-savvy people that changes each year. Several months before Mainsail, for four or five hours, they sit in a conference room as slides of the applicants' work are projected, four from each artist. Three of them are of individual works and one is of the artist's booth, "to make sure an artist has more than just three good pieces," Wells says.

There is no discussion and each screener has only that one opportunity to rank an artist on a scale of one to five. Except no one can choose the number three.

"They have to make a decision," Wells says, "and not be neutral."

The scores are tallied and the top 270 the most the park can hold make the Mainsail list.