By Elexa Kopty:
As the festival season in Buffalo is rounding out to a close, The Elmwood Village is hopping with artists and visitors. The Avenue of eccentricity is especially littered with characters this weekend for the 13th annual Elmwood Festival of the Arts. Festival Chairman Joe DiPasquale explains that the Elmwood Village is celebrating art in all its forms, acknowledging not only visual art, but the "creative and expressive nature of humanity and its manifestations."
As always, there is art available for purchase (over 170 vendors, and 85% of them are local), three tents showcasing over fifty performances, a dance tent with several local musicians to groove to, kid-friendly activities and a Festival Café with over 10 local culinary treasures under one tent.
The festival is making an especially conscious effort to stay green this year, "Environmental Row" has booths with information about different aspects of environmentalism. In addition, two of the three stages are solar powered and smoothies are made with solar powered blenders.
Performances run all day both days, and Saturday offers an after party featuring musical artists Driftwood and One World Tribe. Elmwood is closed to traffic beginning at 6am on Saturday until 9pm on Sunday. The festival runs between West Ferry and Lafayette from 10am to 6pm on Saturday and 10am to 5pm on Sunday, rain or shine.
Photo: Six Dimension Design builds "The Mother Ship"
terrific festival. the kid activities, food, and music make it one of the best festivals in town.
i noticed they stopped revealing the hometowns of the craftspeople in the festival booklet, probably so that annoying people like me would stop noticing that most of them come from well beyond the borders of erie county, thus abandoning the festival's mission to promote local artists.
Cheap comment. I dare you to go ask the festival organizers for proof - they still commit near 85% of vendors slots to local.artists. You make such a bold assumption with little knowledge. But then again that's easier. Right? Your comment was unnecessary, as is my saying anything more about it.
The hometowns of each artist are all listed online, if you're curious - http://eafa.techriver.net/artists-market/
From what I can tell it looks like they were simply removed from the booklet to save space.
I haven't done a tally (and I'm not going to) but when I had a chance to leave my booth to check out the rest of the festival, I saw many, many local artists that I know and recognize. Local art was incredibly well represented, and I think it's perfectly fine to have a couple vendors from out of town. It gives them a chance to see how great the city is, and they'll hopefully spread the word about all the good things happening in Buffalo. Not only that, but some of the out of town artists are native Buffalonians that love coming back for the festival.