SPANISH FORT, Ala. — Art enthusiasts helped pump an additional $2,000 to the Mobile Association for the Blind Saturday and Sunday, but organizers contend Mardi Gras and Senior Bowl competition lessened the fundraiser’s inaugural Baldwin County showing.

The Mobile Association for the Blind has partnered with Walter Edelman, a wholesale art gallery owner in New York City, to host a two-day art show and sale benefiting the 83-year-old nonprofit that helps provide employment and career services for the disabled.

With prices ranging from $50 to $50,000, the event offered more than 500 investment-quality pieces of art patrons might find in museums or private collections.

John Hakanson, the Mobile-based association’s grant writer and fundraiser, said Saturday’s event at Five Rivers Delta Resource Center netted only about $600 of the total $10,000 in direct art sales. Twenty percent of total sales benefited the organization.

Five Rivers Assistant Manager Shonda Borden said between 100 and 150 visitors strolled through the five-hour showing, with Edelman offering historical context and insightful tidbits about the artists represented. The show featured both American and European artists — renowned and unknown — in a variety of styles such as paintings, etchings, lithographs, watercolors and engravings.

“We were very pleased with the turnout, and we definitely would have seen more people without competition from the Senior Bowl,” Borden said.

Sunday’s showing at the Daugherty Gallery in Mobile generated substantially more business, and Hakanson said he is considering marketing future Baldwin County events to a gallery in Fairhope to more directly tap the Eastern Shore’s artistic pulse.

“Considering it’s the first show we did in Baldwin County it might just need some time to build. Our first show in Mobile last August wasn’t especially successful, either, but we saw a lot of traffic Sunday, so maybe time will tell,” he said.

The Mobile Association for the Blind, founded in 1926, serves and employs people with disabilities, providing work space for employees to manufacture mops, brooms and plastic bags, the sale of which supports the operation.