At the end of April I had a booth at Artscape 2025 at the Dallas Arboretum. This was a really exciting event for me, because I have always thought my work would be perfect for events at the Arboretum. I mean, I paint flowers! It’s perfect.

This blog is part of my series about doing events as an artist. I get asked all the time about how to do events, and I’m not here to gatekeep so let’s get into it! At the end of this post, you can also see related posts about other events I’ve done.

Applying and Getting in to Artscape

This was an easy one for me, because I was actually invited to participate in this event without applying, however typically you would apply on Zapplication, and you need to pay the application fee and show a photo of your booth and your artwork. This is how most juried art shows work. In my case, I reached out to the Arboretum about being a vendor at their events late last year (2024), and periodically checked back in with their events manager about upcoming events.

I did have to upgrade my tent and display to participate in this event. A white tent was required (my old one was red – a relic of my son playing soccer when he was little), and you also had to have sidewalls that sufficiently block the vendors around you.

Dallas Arboretum Artscape 2025 Vendor Experience

For the most part I was very pleasantly surprised about the vendor experience for this event. Here’s what I loved:

• Load-in for the event was very easy and seemed to flow well. It was staggered, so all of the artists chose a timeframe to set-up, and golf carts were available to drive you and all of your gear to your setup space.
• The garden is beautiful! I really like the Dallas Arboretum. I just love flowers.
• There was great communication leading up to the event. I can’t say enough good things about how easy the communication was!
• There was a hospitality tent with snacks and water for artists. We do love to stay hydrated.
• Learning from other artists and vendors about what they do and their experience making a living as an artist!

Here are a few things I didn’t love:

• Foot traffic was much slower than I expected. All of the other vendors I spoke with said the same thing – they were expecting higher attendance to the event. This can happen for a myriad of reasons and I don’t have reason to believe it would be slow in future years, but it does give me pause about signing up for this show again.
• Load-out for the event was kind of weird. Once we broke everything down, we were instructed to text a phone number to get on a waitlist for the golf carts to help take stuff to our cars. Since everyone was trying to leave at the same time, I wound up enlisting my husband’s help and we carted everything to my car ourselves. This wasn’t possible for every vendor, but since my booth was relatively easy to pack up, it worked for us. It was about a 6 minute walk to the car, and I was sweating when we finally got there.
• It was advertised as 100+ artists, but there were only about 80 of us. This just didn’t sit right with me.
• My booth location, along with about 10 others, was off the beaten path. It felt like we were separate and not part of the main festival, and I do think this impacted all of our sales. If I were to do this event again, I would request to be placed in the main artist area.

My Inexpensive Artist Booth Setup

As I mentioned, I had to level-up my booth for this event. It was required that your tent be white and it have walls to separate your space from others around you, but I wasn’t ready to drop a cool three grand on an official artist tent setup with gallery walls. Here’s what I got instead:

• This white pop-up tent – This tent is great. It’s way better than my last one, and easier to set up and break down too. If you are just starting with art events, do yourself a favor and buy a white tent to begin with. Most of the art festivals require that your tent be white.
  • Note: A lot of the bigger shows require a sturdier (more expensive, like thousands of dollars) tent. I decided to get an inexpensive pop-up tent while I feel out which shows work best for me.
• These mesh tarps – I use these as side walls to display my artwork, and they work but I will be upgrading these soon. This was an inexpensive solution for this show, but I don’t love how they wrinkle and they aren’t perfectly sized to my tent. I ordered 10’x6′ tarps, but they are much longer than 10′, so they aren’t as taught as I would prefer.
  • To attach my paintings to the sidewalls, I bought these things:
    • Ball bungee cords – I used these to attach the mesh tarp to the tent – they work great! I also use these across the top of my banners to attach them to the tent.
    • Hanging tabs – I attached these to the backs of my paintings to hang them. Since my work is watercolor on paper, it’s already packaged in plastic, so I stuck these tabs to the plastic to hang them. If your work is on canvas, you don’t need these.
    • Curtain hooks – These hooks stick right through the canvas mesh and hold your work well. You can use these with hanging tabs on flat paintings or with canvases.

I already had the tables, tent weights, and table cloths, and I built the little wooden sign stand from scrap wood in my garage. I’ll do another post in the future about everything I take to outdoor events.

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Overall Thoughts

This event was such a learning experience for me! I loved talking to the other artists there who have been doing big shows for a while. This was my first 3-day event, and it was nice to not have to setup and break down each day. Usually when I have multi-day events it’s because I booked 2 entirely different markets on each weekend day, so I setup and breakdown my booth each day.

Truth be told, I am on the fence about whether I would do this event again. While I made money, the booth fee was high ($325 in 2025) and traffic was slow. I sold a lot of prints and coloring stacks, but no originals, which I was surprised by. Overall it was a great experience because I learned a lot and talked to other artists (SO important!), but it wasn’t a slam dunk sales-wise.