For the second year in a row, the Art Across the Marsh studio tour has been cancelled due to COVID-19.
Earlier this week it appeared that the long-running art and craft studio tour would be able to go ahead under the province’s circuit breaker rules. While personal gatherings have been limited to one household only, businesses are able to run with their usual capacity, as long as they require patrons to wear masks and show ID and proof of full vaccination.
Participating artist Robert Lyon says that the organizing group had debated whether or not to take on the tour this year, but decided to go ahead because, “everything was looking good when we started planning, and we proceeded from there.”
The group printed brochures featuring maps and descriptions of the various participating studios and galleries, which span the Tantramar region. But then case counts started to mount in New Brunswick, and circuit breaker measures were announced, and it seemed the 2021 event might suffer the same fate as its 2020 counterpart. But with different rules this time around, and businesses still allowed to operate as normal while requiring ID and proof of vaccination from patrons, Art Across the Marsh was still a go.
“We just kind of changed the protocols and posted and advertised that any visitors would have to be fully vaccinated and show proof of that. And masks would be mandatory, and social distancing–all the protocols that are commonplace everywhere,” says Lyon.
But that changed on Tuesday, when Public Health called Lyon to advise him to shut down the event.
“Some of the participants, their studio is in their home,” says Lyon. “And so they would be having visitors coming into their studio, in their house.” The public health official told Lyon that “those people were not allowed under any circumstances to have people in their home.”
“They basically said they’re not businesses, that it’s no different than having people over for Thanksgiving dinner,” recounts Lyon. “Even though we’re following all the protocols and asking for proof of vaccination.”
About one third of the artists featured in the tour have home studios, says Lyon. And others with studios set apart from their homes were still “strongly advised” not to open, says Lyon. The tour also crosses a provincial border, where the rules around the pandemic are completely different, so Lyon says the group was “caught in a conundrum.”
“In the end, all the participants were so gracious and we just discussed it [Tuesday] night and decided the best thing is just to cancel the event altogether. It would just cause too much confusion to now say, after the maps are out there and the brochures and everything, to say you can go to this one, but not that one.”
The impact will be felt by the region’s artists, says Lyon, many of whom rely on income from sales during events like Art Across the Marsh.
“Effectively we would generate revenue over the course of the tour upwards of $20,000 or $30,000,” says Lyon. “That would go back into this region, right? So it’s an economic impact as well.”
Lyon makes his living as a full time artist, but says “even artists that may have a job outside of the arts, this is still a major stepping stone for them, to get to the point where they can be a full time artist.”
“The arts are a huge economic engine in this community,” says Lyon. “We are an industry, by the very definition. And all the arts are suffering terribly.”
Lyon is critical of the confusing messaging coming from the province regarding circuit breaker rules, and which businesses can continue to operate. He’s also critical of the lack of support for small businesses that are suffering. “The New Brunswick government has offered nothing in the way of compensation for small businesses that have been affected by shutdowns and lock downs,” says Lyon. “I know they had a program where they would offer a little bit of money, but when you looked into it, I don’t think very many businesses would fit into it.”
“If you look at Sackville, we are primarily small mom-and-pop shops, and Sackville is indicative of most small communities in New Brunswick,” says Lyon. “And everybody is struggling.”
Lyon acknowledges there’s been some support federally, but “there’s no real support of any kind, even outside of financial, from the provincial government.”
Lyon says he’s hesitant to simply postpone the studio tour until a later date, because he’s not sure when the current surge will be over. Instead, the group may attempt something virtual on their Facebook page over the next month. “We’re just seeing if we can pull that together,” he says.
