The historic village has responded to an unpredicted explosion in its number of art galleries — now numbering 19 — by creating an ‘Arrowtown Arts Trail’ to help shepherd tourists towards them — the Arrowtown Creative Arts Society (ACAS) is funding and directing its set-up.
"It’s turned out Arrowtown matches a specific demo-geographic profile that can transform a particular type of small tourist town into a strong arts destination," Arrowtown Creative Arts Society (ACAS) co-chair Julian Knights says.
"There’s potential staring at us, and we’ll use the Arts Trail as a structure to help our many visual artists leverage this opportunity."
Knights says there’s a "quirky" profile needed for an arts town success — a "stand-out" natural environment, an established community of serious artistic talent, likely initially attracted by that natural environment, and a fairly compact retail area with picturesque environs that are mostly walkable.
The hardest part for most small towns is ready access to a large customer flow, however, Destination Queenstown’s visitor surveys indicate of the 2.8million annual visitors to Queenstown, about 1.6m of those, or 57%, at some point spend time in Arrowtown, and almost all of them browse through its main street.
"The Arrowtown profile is an almost an uncanny match to other longer-established ‘village gallery’ destinations, like Cornwall’s St Ives, Bali’s Ubud and New Mexico’s Taos," he says.
"Although a significant proportion of our gallery sales are to overseas customers, the fact that 50% of visitors are Kiwis helps make freighting bulk purchases easier."
The Arrowtown Arts Trail outlets include sculptors, jewellers, painters and photographers, some of whom are relatively new to the area, and several of whom have upped sticks and moved from city locations.
They include Pieter Miering and his artist wife Dalene, of Giraffe Art, who transferred their business from Auckland.
"We chose Arrowtown as the best possible gallery location," Pieter says.
"The place’s ‘feeling’ can’t be replicated."
Pieter’s on the ACAS board and has managed the trail set-up along with established local artist Fiona Garlick, who says her move to an in-town Buckingham St location helped "cement" her position.
Arrowtown Arts Trail will be launched next Thursday at the opening of the Lakes District Museum’s popular 30x30 exhibition, in which the only rule is artwork must fit into a 30cm x 30cm space.
