Our booth at Mercado Sagrado 2014, showing ACF jewelry alongside collaborations with Adina Mills, Three Arrows Leather, Ghost Dancer, Blue Skye, Jetter Green, and more!
I met Carly Jo Morgan, 1/2 of the team behind Mercado Sagrado (the other half being celebrated photographer and canyon dweller Heather Culp) in 2009 when we where both living in Brooklyn, making jewelry, and on the cusp of making some really life changing decisions. Without ever exchanging phone numbers, we both ended up meeting someone special, falling in love and following an invisible ant trail to California by way of the desert. (Taos, NM and Joshua Tree, respectively).
photo by Kacie Tomita
As an introvert, it don't do very many large scale events, but when Carly and I reconnected and she invited ACF to curate a space at the first annual Mercado Sagrado, I immediately said yes. Why? Because Carly is a true visionary, and beyond that completely undeterred by the rigors of actually nurturing a vision all the way through to fruition, so I knew that if this was what she had set her mind to creating, that it would be a marketplace like no other. From the moment the doors opened at noon on saturday, the weekend was a cardamom popsicle fueled, high speed blur of what in my opinion California does best: mix business with pleasure. Many different worlds collided for me in the space of those 2 days, as artists I had known from New York nibbled raw mini vegan cheesecakes alongside my new west coast family from the Spirit Weavers Gathering. Throw in some television stars and magazine models that I admired from the comfort of my parents living room growing up in the 80's and 90's, and you have Mercado Sagrado, proof that LA is one long, collective lucid dream, yours to be enjoyed if you can manage to quit wondering if everyone could possibly be for real.