Annual arts festival features 150 booths, entertainment
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GO!/Annual arts festival features 150 booths, entertainment, fun for whole family
A major challenge facing Elizabeth Regner, Lubbock Arts Alliance executive director, each year is the need to discover something new and fresh - within her budget - that can attract more people to the annual Lubbock Arts Festival.
It is one thing to bring back attractions which have proven popular on an annual basis.
And this year she might have been satisfied with increasing the number of booth artists from 100 to 150.
Instead, she mailed an invitation to Nathan Sawaya, whose work has been attracting the attention of museums and magazines - thanks to his decision to make children's building blocks his artistic medium, specifically the Lego's brand.
Festival co-chairmen Pat Maines and Ben Davidson were quick to give this year's festival the theme of "Life, Lego Art and the Pursuit of Happiness."
The festival will take place from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and noon through 5 p.m. April 18, at the Lubbock Memorial Civic Center, 1501 Mac Davis Lane.
Premiere Night offers a sneak peek at literally everything from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday. Look for serious art collectors to be in attendance then, wanting the earliest opportunities to view art.
Regner said, Premiere Night "sets the tone for the rest of the event. if you are a hit during Premiere Night, you will be a hit the rest of the weekend."
The Juried Gallery will fill one-third of the civic center's banquet room. The Invitational Gallery will be given space in the exhibit hall, the same venue which this weekend will be filled with 150 booth artists
This year's Premiere Night also is being held in honor of arts supporters Louise Wilson and Robert N. Arnold, who grew up living next door to each other in Floydada and graduated from Floydada High School in 1941. It was not until Aug. 25, 1949, several years after graduating from college, that the two were married.
Louise became the first president and executive director of the Helen Jones Foundation.
During their 60 years of marriage, they have collected contemporary ceramics, glass art, baskets native American pottery and contemporary Native American paintings.
This is the seventh arts festival under Regner's supervision. she said attendance has grown by more than 15,000 in the past five years, while the same time period has seen the number of participating artists leapfrog from 50 to 250.
This year finds 40 artworks in the Juried Gallery and 25 in the Invitational Gallery.
The budget this year, said Regner, is $285,195, with funds provided through "individual donors, corporate sponsors, grants and earned income."
The latter includes everything from the admission price to sales for ticketed events.
Booth artists are not asked to contribute a percentage of their sales, taking advantage of a flat booth rental fee. however, should works of art in the major galleries sell, one third of the sales price is kept by the Lubbock Arts Alliance.
"That's pretty standard in most galleries," said Regner.
This year's festival spotlight artist, chosen unanimously by a search committee, is Lubbock artist Carol C. Howell, who told The A-J, "I have decided to donate 40 percent of each painting sold to the Lubbock Arts Alliance as my contribution. I hope, in this way, I can help further the development of LAA and the festival."
She pointed out that she has attended every arts festival and that, when her daughter recently turned 28, "I remembered pushing her in her stroller at the arts festival when she was a toddler 27 tears ago."
Howell has done nothing but paint since being chosen. she finished 23 works since Jan. 1. Two were sold. Two more are spoken for, but will be included with the 21 she plans to show.
Her favorite, among them all, is called "Wired."
Choosing which of her oil paintings to use on the 2010 festival poster was not an easy process. In fact, Howell had two possibilities finished and another also was taking shape.
That was before she drove downtown and began taking pictures of local alleys.
The result is an oil painting that she titled "Wired."
The artist said, "I had no idea that Xcel Energy and LP&L were merging to get rid of those 'ugly' wires. Granted, they are not terribly attractive, but they are really fun to draw and paint. I am not such a political animal. It ('Wired') is just a gut response to light and shadow and patterns to make what I hope is a good painting. And I love to draw perspective.
"Also, it is about downtown Lubbock, as it is growing and changing. It would be great to have a clean, active, productive downtown, and we are moving in that direction. This poster might be a memory of what it used to look like back in 2010."
Authors Kippra D. Hopper and Laurie J. Churchill also plan to debut a new coffee table volume called "Art of West Texas Women," published by Texas Tech Press.
The 20 artists in this volume are Future Akins, Doris Alexander, Toni Arnett, Linda Cullum, Tina Fuentes, Robin Dru Germany, Marilyn Grisham, Lahib Jaddo, Anna Jaquez, Dale Jenssen, Patricia Kisor and Abby Levine.
Also, Pat Maines, Deborah Milosevich, Maria Almeida Natividad, Collie Ryan, Mary Solomon, Sara Waters and Amy Winton.
Different works by these artists will be featured throughout the festival. On Thursday, look for the authors and all featured artists - except Jensssen and Waters - to be present, signing first-edition copies of the book.
Hopper said, "We began with artists we knew in Lubbock. from them, we got the names of other artists throughout the western half of Texas.
"We knew there was no way to create a complete comprehensive book about all of the women artists in the region, so we chose artists who we knew or whose work we knew. The artists led to other artists."
Hopper also stated, "The idea also was that in this seemingly boring landscape, art thrives. I am a landscape photographer and know for certain that the region is in fact beautiful, but ... outsiders from Dallas and Austin never give the area credit for natural beauty. The artists we interviewed, though, all appreciate the landscape and beauty of the region.
"... They all have lived in the region for years, and they all love the region."
A second theme was the chosen artists coming of age "during the second real feminist movement," added Hopper.
The 2010 festival does not line up with the date that major comic books are given away, so that will be a change.
(Free Comics Day is the first Saturday in May; be sure to visit Star Comics on that day.)
But will Terrell, representing Lubbock Sketch Club, said, "We will focus a lot on creating interactive art: drawing classes for kids, stick-figure-drawing competitions, art walls for people to post sketches they do at the show, and events like fill-in-the-blanks comic pages.
"We also will exhibit a number of local and regional comic book artists who are selling their books and other products they have made."
The Lubbock Arts Alliance already has invested in 10,000 Lego building bricks that children can use while attending the festival, said Regner.
Mind you, that pretty much pales in comparison to what visitors might see at Sawaya's studio in new York City.
At any point in time, Sawaya depends on there always being at least one and a half million Lego building blocks in his Manhattan art studio, he said.
This week will find 30 of his least-viewed works of art shipped to Lubbock for exhibition at the 32nd Lubbock Arts Festival.
Some were exhibited only once, at a gallery in Connecticut. The remainder are new pieces that Sawaya is shipping directly from his studio.
They never have been seen by the public, although the artist has received plenty of requests from major galleries.
Although not officially tied to the arts festival, Kelley Pitts, development officer for KTXT-TV Channel 5 in Lubbock, e-mailed, "We are airing 'Curiosity Quest: Legoland' at 2:30 p.m. April 11 (today), and at 8 p.m. April 15 (Thursday).
"This show shows how Legos are constructed," said Pitts, and will take a look at the world of model-building and fascinating rides at Legoland.
Sawaya's experiments have grown from an 8-foot-tall pencil to a dinosaur skeleton 20 feet long, made with 80,000 Lego bricks.
His Lego creations range from a cello to an artwork commissioned by Donald Trump for a new hotel in Dubai.
(See Friday's GO section for The A-J's interview with Lego artist Nathan Sawaya.)
Two professional opera singers, soprano Jamie-Rose Guarrine and baritone Sean Anderson, will perform "Words & Music," at 2 p.m. April 18.
The program is designed to attract newcomers to the world of opera. A brief question-and-answer session will follow.
Guarrine, 30, is originally from Illinois and said she had no similar opera programs to study while growing up.
Instead, she started appearing in musical theater at age 5, and continued auditioning for every show until, while in college, she learned that musical theater singers tend to burn out and opera singers can enjoy much longer careers.
Even so, opera presently is much more popular in Europe than in the United States.
Guarrine hopes programs such as "Words and Music" will serve as an attractive introduction to the art form for all ages.
The program will last only one hour, with "Words & Music" making use of some humor, and the performers also delivering arias and songs before a question-and-answer session.
April 18 also marks the return of the arts festival's popular server competition called Golden Fork, in which 14 restaurants and caterers will serve signature entrees and visitors can taste them all before voting for their personal favorite.
Regner said the Golden Fork competition began in 1996.
Past winners have included: 1996, Rawl's Golf Course; 2007, Twain's; 2008, United Supermarket; and 2009, Cafe J.
Cafe J has re-entered and hopes to retain its title.
Efforts are made annually to improve the festival, said Reg-ner, without losing sight of keeping all of the city's nonprofit organizations involved.
In fact, Lubbock's arts festival has served as a model for other cities considering producing similar festivals.
"Last year," recalled Regner, "the producers of an arts festival in Austin visited and wanted information on how we do our Young Artists and Young Writers competitions. Before that, officials with the city of McAllen came to see our arts festival so they could pattern their event after ours.
"It is nice to know that people outside our community think we're doing something special."
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Annual arts festival features 150 booths, entertainment
Tags: Robin Dru Germany, AUSTIN, museums, D. Hopper, festival, Lubbock, Laurie J. Churchill