Have you ever wanted to wander down booths of market stalls decked out with local, handmade goods and find carefully-crafted objects to decorate your cool, student rental in Athens with? Or maybe you’re looking for a piece to gift to someone for a birthday or holiday season—after all, we all know that handmade gifts are where it’s at.
Enter the Athens Art Guild. The Athens Art Guild is a community of artists from southeastern Ohio, and you can find all sorts of artists and makers in their ranks. From pottery, wood working, fiber art, painting, metalwork, jewelry, and more, it’s all-inclusive at the Athens Art Guild.
The Athens Art Guild puts on their Art Market every Saturday from 9am-12pm at the Athens Community Center at 701 E State Street and runs in conjunction with the Athens Farmers Market—stop by both, and you’ll not only be able to shop handmade art, but you’ll also be able to walk out with fresh, unique produce that you won’t find anywhere else.
Where Can You Find the Art Market?
On Saturday mornings, you’ll rows of booths lined with hand painted pottery, live-edge wood tables, whimsical fiber art, meticulously crafted jewelry, and so much more. More than ever, it’s important to support local businesses and makers, when possible, for numerous reasons. For starters, your hard-earned money is directly supporting a person rather than being lost to a larger corporation, and that money is also being put back into your local economy. That support then enables the maker to continue creating meaningful work and contributing to the community through shows and markets like the Art Market. Every year around the holidays, the Athens Art Guild throws on their Holiday Shoppe, featuring an even larger assortment of vendors with all of the best wares for holiday gift-giving.
Why Shop Local and Handmade?
It’s also no secret that handmade objects generally aren’t the ones ending up in landfills. There’s an innate sense of quality within handcrafted pottery, art, and furniture that just doesn’t exist in mass-produced items. They have a story behind them, and that resonates with shoppers and folks who are looking to be more intentional with their purchases.
Plus, handmade items make for the best gifts—they’re special, unique, and chances are they’ll end up being more thoughtful of an item than something picked up from a big box store due to their one-of-a-kind nature and the story behind them. And like we mentioned above, if the recipient likes it, it’s something they’ll want to keep for a long time.
Stop by on a Saturday morning sometime and check out what the Art Market has to offer the community of Athens.