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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
By Ron Ehmke
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The scene at the Elmwood Festival of
the Art's Kidfest.
Photo by Anthony Brown.
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On the weekend of August 23-24, four blocks of one of Buffalo's best-known thoroughfares will be closed to traffic while approximately 80,000 pedestrians peruse the wares of 160 artists and craftspeople, sample the fare of local restaurants, watch a wide range of live performances, and get to know each other as our too-brief summer draws to a close.
Cynics may well sneer, "Great, just what Western New York needs: another street fair." And it's true that from May through September, barely a weekend goes by without at least one opportunity to pig out on fried dough and toss ping-pong balls into goldfish bowls. But the Elmwood Festival of the Arts is something altogether different: a complete reinvention of the very concept from the ground up.
This ambitious endeavor grew from discussions among friends and colleagues back in 1999. As Stephanie Robb of the Lexington Avenue clothing and crafts shop Wild Things recalls, "I was talking to Greg Link, a ceramic artist, at our shop, and we were both saying how great it would be to do a hometown festival run by artists, because their vision is slightly different than the vision of someone out to make a bundle of money. [Our] attention is more focused on the artists, on making them as comfortable as possible, and finding ways for them to increase their business. I said, 'You know, I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I'm going to call Newell [Nussbaumer] from Thunder Bay,' because he's sort of a mover and shaker among the shop owners and entrepreneurs of Elmwood.
"Newell loved the idea and we called a meeting. I feel like I sort of opened my big mouth and started something," Robb says, laughing. She, Link, and Nussbaumer were joined on a March afternoon at Spot Coffee by two more women from Wild Things, Donna Sturges and Karol Kirberger, and by Molly Quill. "Molly and her husband [musician Charlie Quill] had just opened Quill's Apothecary. We knew we wanted to promote merchants as well, to show people that there's a really amazing section of Buffalo that has an incredible variety of goods and services and restaurants to tap into. It wasn't just about the artists but about integrating them into the community."
The final member of the initial group was perhaps the most reluctant. Joe DiPasquale and his wife Tanya Zabinski, proprietors of Planet Love, a locally-based, environmentally-friendly clothing company with a solid international reputation, were seasoned veterans of the nationwide crafts circuit. Averaging twenty out-of-town shows a year, they had first-hand experience with that world: what worked, what didn't, and what fresh innovations might be added to the mix.
DiPasquale and Zabinski had been envisioning a grassroots Buffalo fest for years, borrowing the best aspects of events they'd attended everywhere from the Finger Lakes to Louisville, Kentucky and adapting them to their hometown. "Tanya and I had a lot of ideas about what we liked, what was really creative, what seemed authentic and what seemed canned," DiPasquale notes. When they were invited to the planning meeting, Zabinski, the artist/designer half of the duo, tried to encourage her more entrepreneurially inclined partner to attend. "He said, 'Nah, I don't want to get involved ...'" She persisted: "'But Joe, you have the background, the knowledge, the vision ...'"
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Artist Steve Brouse.
Photo by Anthony Brown.
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Eventually, he succumbed. And, as is so often the case, the wariest participant ended up chairman of the budding festival. With lightning speed, the already overworked father of two transformed what might easily have been a manageable one-night stand into something that would eventually overtake a vast chunk of his family's time and living room. "They wanted to have a little celebration on the street, more like a sidewalk sale with some arts and crafts and some popcorn," DiPasquale remembers. "And I added Kidsfest, Cultural Row, everything. And the idea of closing the street: shutting off Elmwood Avenue was a major [project]."
"Six months later, we had a festival," Robb says. The first year's undertaking, a still-modest one-day affair, was such a success that plans were soon underway for a follow-up, with the core planners now joined by a host of neighborhood volunteers (over 200 at last count) who have dedicated themselves to the annual spectacle, with continuing help from the city, the corporate sector, and Forever Elmwood.
Two things were always clear: that the fest would concentrate on attracting local talent rather than out-of-town vendors, and that special emphasis would be placed on newcomers. "We wanted to take beginning artists, [show them] how the process unfolds, and encourage them to be able to make a living from their work," Robb says. Artists still in school were invited to exhibit in "College Alley."
"I look at it as micro-economic development," DiPasquale adds. "If you can train fifty artists that don't do arts and crafts shows to start doing them, to go out into other communities and to come back five to ten times a year with two to five thousand dollars, that starts adding up."
To that end, the founders envision one day giving their mission a year-round focus by offering workshops to first-time vendors. "It's really hard to get people who spend their lives in their little studio making paintings to get it together enough to get their paintings into a booth," says DiPasquale. To that end, he and his colleagues gladly expend the extra effort to walk artists through every step of the process.
Anne Peterson, whose booth last year marked her debut as a street vendor, is proof that the plan is working. "I had been taking photographs my whole life and never really tried to get into a show," the Buffalo-based artist says. "I'd been involved in a couple of small Christmas sales and fairs, but [Elmwood] was really my first big show. I didn't really know how people went about hanging work, but there was a photographer right next to me, and you might have thought that would be competition, but she helped me put up my tent and showed me what to buy the next time."
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The Elmwood Festival crowd.
Photo courtesy of the Buffalo Gazette.
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The event organizers also helped Peterson and the other artists set up and offered them free morning snacks and a volunteer "boothsitter" in case they needed time away from their stands—perks which are hardly standard practice. Peterson received enough compliments, sold enough work, and had enough fun from the experience that weekend to press on. "Since then, I've had shows at the Mansion on Delaware, Bistro Vite, and El Buen Amigo, and I [was] in the Allentown Festival this year for the first time," she says. And that friendly booth neighbor? "She's going to be the photographer for my wedding this summer, so that was a great connection."
Ceramicist Carrianne Hendrickson was not a neophyte when she first exhibited at the festival, but she, too, found the experience inspirational. An established artist with representation at galleries around the country and a few other shows under her belt, she praises the "much more festive atmosphere" of Elmwood and finds it less stressful on the artists and more art-centered than similar events.
Another key distinction between Elmwood and other arts festivals is its broad, eclectic programming. Musicians from Mark Freeland to the Buffalo Gay Men's Chorus and dance companies from ballet to salsa share multiple stages, while street performers like puppeteers, jugglers, and a capella groups roam the grounds. Meanwhile, representatives of more than three dozen arts organizations and environmental groups form "Cultural Row." Kara Sweet, who handles Community Relations at WBFO-FM, values the station's continued participation: "At all of the festivals we’ve been at, we’ve gotten a huge response. Even people who already know about us [discover] aspects of the station they didn’t know about.
"The festival does wonders for the area. It gives the city a great reputation and draws people from the suburbs who don’t know the wealth of stores and restaurants that Elmwood has. My parents are complete suburbanites, they hardly ever go into the city, but they go in for the festival every year because there’s so much [to do]."
Ask most anyone what makes the late-summer event unique, and the answer is likely to include its family-friendly nature. Zabinski, mastermind (with fellow artist Diane Schaefer) of the Kidsfest tent, was clear from the start that children deserve something more than a half-hearted spin-art stand. To that end, she and Schaefer have found ways to engage kids without a shred of condescension. Each year they devise an overall theme—"Air" in 2002, "Earth" this time around—and a number of participatory projects which culminate in a noisy, colorful parade as things wind down on Sunday.
"We’ve probably gotten ten phone calls from other people trying to run events who want to know how we did it, how much we paid to figure out how to do it, who were the experts that came in and did it," DiPasquale says, clearly amused by the notion. "There’s no ‘experts,’ it’s just Tanya and Diane, who are incredibly creative, hardworking, dedicated volunteers that have spent thousands of hours designing prototypes of things for the kids to make, and forming a committee that meets again and again and again trying to work stuff out."
The same careful attention to detail informs the food court, which shuns traditional summer-fair junk food in favor of healthier, more provocative offerings from area establishments like Cozumel, Common Grounds, and J. P. Bullfeather’s. As with the crafts vendors, many are new to street sales but eager to experiment with expanding their operation: "We want our vendors to do not just our festival, but maybe to say, ‘I just made $10,000 this weekend; I should go to Ithaca and do that one, and bring more money back home,’" DiPasquale says. Moreover, each year, a not-for-profit organization (most recently Locust Street Art Classes) is awarded a complimentary food booth as a fundraiser.
Site Development director Mark Kubiniec points out another crucial aspect of concessions at the festival: the more relaxed atmosphere resulting from a central location. "We wanted to allow people to get good, quality food in one place, and be able to sit down and eat, rather than stand and walk around. We don’t have people walking around stuffing corn dogs down their throat and swigging a beer out of a paper bag. As a result, people selling textiles don’t have their booths polluted by the smoky sausage sold by the vendors next to them."
But some juxtapositions are important, which explains why the spaces allotted to individual booths at the festival are five feet longer than those at most such events: no matter what the artists choose to do with the extra room, festivalgoers are able to see the retail establishments behind the temporary stands. It’s another typically elegant solution to a problem which plagues all street fairs: the tension between bringing new people into a commercial district for a special event and inadvertently preventing storeowners from conducting business as usual for a weekend.
The organizers’ dedication to Elmwood’s more permanent establishments goes even farther. "What we’re doing is a development tool for area businesses," DiPasquale says. "We spend many hours encouraging it. Newell Nussbaumer walked up and down that street a hundred times trying to help people come up with ideas of how to promote their businesses in an artful way." So far, that has included window installations, mini-exhibitions, and architectural tours, among other inventive projects.
"The businesses on Elmwood aren’t going to be making $20,000 that weekend," he continues, "but that’s a really slow period; it’s the weekend before a major holiday, and it’s really hot. To be able to bring 80,000 people walking down the avenue and seeing what’s there, as any urban planner will tell you, can only benefit the neighborhood."
Describing the philosophy of the event, the word DiPasquale uses most often is "texture." "A lot of festivals you go to [provide] block upon block of the same thing. It’s static; it’s numbing. Whereas our festival is textured; everywhere you look, there’s something different going on. Some of it is spontaneous, obviously, but a lot of it is programmed.
"What we’re trying to do is lay a groundwork for people to come in and participate. We’re setting the stage, but it doesn’t work unless many different types of people from all over our community, from every neighborhood, from every walk of life, come to it. It’s one of the most diverse festivals I’ve ever been to."
Kubiniec offers hard evidence of the event’s impact, noting that "our festival has provided $45,000 in sales tax to New York state." The all-volunteer effort also spent $30-35,000 in services last year. "We don’t ask for freebies, we pay as we go," he points out.
For Zabinski, economics is simply icing on the cake. "The main gist of the show is community spirit," she contends. The festival is "from the community, and it’s for the community. At the end of the Kidsfest, instead of all the kids doing individual activities and going home, they make things and bring them to the parade." While Buffalo’s art scene can often feel isolating, she says, the collective effort is a visual demonstration that "we’re not alone, we’re together."
Stephanie Robb agrees. "I think we’ve got a special thing going. People really recognize it, they feel that care and that sense of community, they feel that they’re part of something." Carrianne Hendrickson echoes that sentiment: "It’s a celebration, and we need more celebration, especially in Buffalo."
Ron Ehmke is a writer, performer and teacher based in Tonawanda.
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