Artists Showcase Unique Wares at Atlanta Fan Culture Convention
- Fynn Grindle '25 and Rachel Spooner '26
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Spread across over 600,000 square feet in the Georgia World Congress Center, MomoCon’s exhibition hall offered convention-goers a unique, large-scale shopping experience with a lot of heart. The rows of tables housed hundreds of local and out of state vendors and artists showcasing their wares, ranging from fan art and figurines to hand-made jewelry and fandom-specific tea leaves.
Shopping areas, often split into vendor halls and artist alleys, are common in many pop-culture and anime conventions like MomoCon and the similarly beloved Atlanta staple, Dragon Con. For some artists, the craft they display is the product of full-time work. For others, a side-gig.
Yingzong Xin, owner of WitchXing and a character designer on several Pixar productions, started selling art at conventions last year, calling it “kind of a side hustle.” Xin's table displayed art prints, pins, and stickers inspired by a multitude of fandoms. Her most prominently featured collections were “Bad Girls Club" and "Girl with Sword”: two series of knightly interpretations of Disney princesses.
“I think it started with Cinderella; I drew her as an assassin,” Xin said. “I just wanted to do an alternative version of the old Disney princesses, make it a more modern style.” MomoCon was the Bay Area native’s first visit to Atlanta.
Ran, owner of Pittsburgh-based hair stick and accessory shop, A Case of Random, has been a full-time artist since 2009. “I always made things,” Ran said, hands weaving together threads of wire as she spoke. “I have been making some form of jewelry since I was a little kid and it wasn't until the mid-2000s that it became, ‘Hey, let's actually try to make money off of this for realsies.’”
Despite the thousands of fans at MomoCon, Xin called the sales on Thursday, the first day of the convention, “pretty slow,” despite there being significant interest in her art. With so many vendors, and a young target demographic, competition for sales can be significant. Yet, for some artists like Xin and Ran, having business cards or QR code scans leading to their social media accounts could help boost engagement and spread visibility about their craft, even without a monetary purchase.
A Case of Random regularly attends conventions, the most recent landing her in Tennessee in
April for MTAC, the Middle Tennessee Anime Convention. As for Atlanta, though, Ran was familiar with the city, active in the Atlanta convention scene since before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There have been stretches that the only things that have kept me going are blind luck and being really bad at math,” Ran joked. Still, she recognized that “being your own business, it is hard, it is tricky, it is a perpetual struggle. It is rewarding and it is very hard to go back to working for anybody else.”
2025 marked MomoCon's twentieth anniversary in Atlanta, initially born out of a small group's passion for fan culture and community in 2005. MomoCon is a symbol of pride for convention lovers in the peach state, with its namesake, ‘momo’ (桃) being the Japanese word for peach. Though this year's four-day celebration has passed, Atlanta natives and visitors can look forward to the next season May 21-24, 2026.