Roaming trolls, paintings inspired by the sound of a person’s voice and fire-breathers, the Charlottesville Arts Festival had it all.
Roughly 650 people came out to Ix Art Park in downtown Charlottesville Saturday afternoon for the first of the two-day event, only the fourth time the festival has been held.
“We’re really lucky to have over 50 amazing fine artists this year, we have roving performers and live music,” organizer Ewa Harr told The Daily Progress. “We’ve got a great turnout. It’s an exciting day for us here.”
For festival-goers, it was an opportunity to have their fortunes read on children’s alphabet cards by Haggis the Troll (“E for elephant” is a bad omen) or find out what colors and patterns their voice looks like to Blake Bottoms, a local artist with chromesthesia, a neurological condition that causes a person to experience colors and shapes based on sounds.
People are also reading…
For artists, the busy first day of the local art festival was a sign that their industry might finally be seeing a return to normalcy four years out from a pandemic that brought the world to a standstill.
Dana Wheeles of Deerhawk Art Studio, who was selling her bird-themed artwork at the festival, told The Daily Progress that she’s found most people are less willing to invest in “luxury items,” which includes arts and crafts, in recent years. But “people are buying more,” she said Saturday, something she also noticed while selling her wares at last weekend’s Crozet Arts and Crafts Festival.
Jes Bossens, who was at the festival running a handmade leather goods stall for her business the Leathered Lamb, shared Wheeles’ observation, saying that local artisans were hit specially hard by the pandemic but it feels as though sales have been “doing a lot better post-COVID.”
The Charlottesville Arts Festival isn’t just an opportunity to make a profit, Wheeles said it’s also a chance to “lean into my weird.” Charlottesville, she said, has a tendency toward the strange, the eccentric and the unorthodox.
“For Charlottesville, I’m going to feel more comfortable bringing the weirder pieces; I feel like there’s a more hip sort of crowd coming to Ix,” she said. “I get to be really weird here.”
And indeed, Wheeles’ portraits of female figures with ostrich heads set inside ornate frames seemed commonplace at a festival where visitors dressed as a troll, a snail and a mushroom mingled with the crowd informing attendees they had been sent by the “Fae Federation.”
Several different musical acts and creative workshops drew even more of a crowd throughout the day with Alignedwire instructing participants on wire-wrapping techniques for crystal jewelry, an electronic sound bath submersion and performance by Swansong and the Tie Dye Mafia.
However, the show-stopper came at 7 p.m. Saturday when the Bad Hat Fire troupe took to the stage alongside their renovated bus, the Rusty Iris, to breathe, eat, spin and dance with fire. The group of local fire dancers has been a part of the art festival over the past several years as well as Charlottesville’s Tom Tom Festival, which took place last month.
Though the nonprofit organization that operates Ix Art Park has struggled financially over the past year, laying off four of its five full-time employees in the fall, Harr, Ix’s executive director, said things are starting to look up as more and more groups are reaching out to participate in some of the many festivals the park has lined up over the summer months.
“We’re starting to dream big again,” said Harr.
