From the 58th Chautauqua Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art through the Annual Student Exhibition, the Fowler-Kellogg and Strohl art centers have hosted a number of different artists from all over the country this summer.
The theater has backstage tours. The symphony has Q-and-A sessions. The School of Art has open studio night.
After five years, Cathy Digel is stepping down from running Art in the Park.
This Sunday, look for the red balloons — and for the artists beneath. For this year’s major fundraiser, VACI Partners,…
This year’s Stroll Through the Arts will bring back the silent auction, with all the objects correlating to the themes of this summer’s gallery exhibitions.
Predictions of sunny weather for this weekend have both the coordinators and vendors of this summer’s first Art in the Park excited and hopeful that rain and gray skies will not damper the popular event.
The annual Stroll Through the Arts fundraiser for art student scholarships will go off with a hitch this year — several hitches, actually. As guests arrive at Fowler-Kellogg Art Center at 5 p.m. Thursday, they will each have a name placed on their backs: one half of a famous artistic couple, like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, for example.
VACI Partners and the artists included in the Art in the Park sale are doing an anti-rain dance this year. And this is not just because of how rainy the past two weeks have been; rather, during last year’s art sale, it rained so hard even the fused glass under Wendy Cohen’s tent got wet and Sean Huntington lost one of his watercolor paintings.
Last season, mid-afternoon on Thursday, July 21, the power went out while Lynn LeFauve and Jamie Jamison were in the middle of putting together the VACI Partners fundraising event, Stroll Through The Arts.
“We were in the gallery setting up, and it was really hot, just like it is now, and the electricity went out for 16 hours — the whole grid blew,” LeFauve said. The event’s co-chairs looked at each other: What would they do with the event, the band and all the food?
“The Athenaeum was fabulous,” LeFauve said. “We regrouped and reorganized for Sunday.”
Kathy Diegel and Kenny Koblitz are crossing their fingers that it doesn’t rain this weekend. From 12–4:30 p.m. Sunday in Miller Park, the VACI Partners’ Art in the Park will happen, according to the event’s co-chairs, rain or shine.
For those who loved the Chautauqua Crafts Alliance Festival and are looking for more art and crafts, Art in the Park provides just that, though in an atmosphere a touch less formal.
“I like to think of it as a democratic art show,” Diegel said, “because anybody who wants to participate can. A lot of the artists are from this region, and many of them are repeats.”
