Arts and craft festival draws a crowd to downtown Wilmore
Published 10:00 am Wednesday, October 11, 2023
Crispy leaves crinkled under visitors’ feet on their way to Wilmore’s Main Street for the 24th Annual Arts and Crafts Festival last Saturday.
According to attendees and vendors alike, the festival was a success as the streets were lined with dozens of vendors, and festivalgoers filled the space between the vendors to the brim, much like a heavily populated metropolitan area.
Sally Satterwhite said it’s always this busy.
Satterwhite is a Jessamine County artist. She had her booth at the festival filled with paintings of flowers, pumpkins, and more. She’s been painting for about five or six years; this was her third year at the festival. She said out of all the festivals, this is the best one she sells at.
“(This festival) has the most traffic, it’s the most well-organized, and I make the most money here. This is a great festival, it is. And we’re fortunate that the weather held out. We were really worried about rain and wind,” Satterwhite said.
Vendors sold baby clothes, jewelry, honey, jams, art, fiber goods and more.
One of the fiber goods vendors has been honing her craft for about 40 years.
Mary Barlow does three shows a year selling her wares, and this festival is her last one for the year.
When she began working at Shaker Village, Barlow started weaving baskets, blankets, and other fiber goods. She worked at the village for 20 years and has found a new historic home.
“Now I’m at Fort Harrod. I’ve been there now for about 20 years,” Barlow said, standing behind a rack of her rugs adjacent to her hanging onion baskets.
Barlow has been selling at the Wilmore festival for years and
Dorset-based Gary Spratt explained: “The exhibition has come about after winning the Oxmarket Open Painting Prize. It will focus on my larger paintings made in the last couple of years. They are about our home, or anyone’s home, with tables, chairs, doorways and a variety of other items as their subject.
“What they mean is up to the viewer. However what they are to me is a way into making a painting. Its formal or abstract nature is in tension with a figurative idea, both of which come about during the making. But the things or objects in the images often carry personal meaning. For instance, the kitchen table my father made or my grandfather’s chairs feature prominently. There’s an idea about inheritance in that, in the things that we may bring forward.
“Sometimes I think that because I’m making images of the interior of my own house, that I’m painting my own safety net, as we are lucky to live in social housing.
“There are a lot of connections. I’m interested in animism, that things have stories and lodge themselves in our lives. Through the work I am both asking and answering my own questions, but in a way that opens up more questions. So it goes on.
“I stick to fairly basic materials, mostly oil on canvas or charcoal on paper. Although I favour oil paint, I don’t think that it really matters all that much with regard to the painting itself. Painting is slow, oil paint is slow to dry, so it works for me.
“I have been exhibiting my work for the last eight years.
“Particular highlights have been making it onto the short list for the Contemport British Painting Prize 2021, showing in London and Huddersfield.
THOUGH SALIMA BOUFELFEL and Roberto Cowan are known in the fashion world as the owners of the influential vintage clothing boutique Desert Vintage, they’re historians at heart. Tucson natives, they met as college students while working at an outpost of the used clothing chain Buffalo Exchange across the street from the University of Arizona. Boufelfel, 36, grew up in a family of artists and academics and developed an affinity for styling while costuming school plays; Cowan, 33, comes from a long line of seamstresses and taught himself to sew around age 13. Both knew early on that they wanted to work with historical fashion so, in 2012, after the owner of a Tucson vintage boutique that Boufelfel frequented put the business up for sale, they took it over, keeping the name and stocking it with pieces not only obscure (Jean Varon and Michael Vollbracht evening gowns; an ’80s jumpsuit from a label called Workers for Freedom) but also rare (Fortuny Delphos dresses, a Victorian-era matador jacket). Eleven years later, their collection of some 5,000 items — spanning Edwardian London to Y2K Tokyo — has drawn a global following of designers and stylists, who turn to Desert Vintage both to inform their work and to fill their personal wardrobes.
Yet even as they’ve traveled the world to source stock from dealers, archives and private collectors — they opened a second storefront on New York’s Lower East Side last year — Boufelfel and Cowan have remained in their hometown. For many years, they were romantically involved but are now best friends, professional partners and housemates, sharing an 1860s Territorial Style adobe-brick bungalow built using millenniums-old techniques. Situated just south of downtown Tucson in Barrio Viejo, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, the two-bedroom structure functions as a source of inspiration for the
Tribecan Max Miller has been making art just about as long as he can remember. He was 13 when he started taking classes at The Art Students League and a few years later, went to RISD for college, Yale for graduate school in fine arts and then, arriving in New York City not long after, did what every New York artist does: got scrappy.
And it paid off. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1987 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1991 — there are others too — and the Metropolitan and several corporate collections own his work. It’s all spectacular: monumental, detailed, clever, colorful and a master class in craft (The apartment she shares with his wife, Carla Hoke-Miller, is also a work of art — but more on that later.)
His passion project of the past few years has been painting dogs, but these are not your average canine portraits. It all started with the couple’s Welsh Corgi LouLou, and now has grown to include commissions from all over the world. Scroll through to see more and hear Miller’s story. (His human portraits are beautiful too, so I have included a couple. It was hard to choose.)
How did you get started?
I was always making art. My dad was an architect so I just always loved doing it. I remember I was with my mom at MoMA and I saw abstract paintings and I thought, that’s so great – I’m going to go do that. And my parents were very supportive.
From New Haven I came to New York, to an apartment at 38th and Ninth. I was painting houses and working at a showroom steaming clothes – different odds and ends. But that place was amazing.
When Ahmed Rabbani ran out of paint to satisfy his artistic yearnings during 20 years of incarceration at Guantanamo Bay, he turned to whatever came to hand – dirt, coffee grinds and even spices such as turmeric from the prison canteen.
“Through painting, I would feel myself outside Guantanamo,” the 53-year-old Pakistani said this week at an exhibition of his work in Karachi.
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“While Ghul went back to his terrorist ways and was killed in a drone strike in 2012, Ahmed got a one-way trip to Guantanamo Bay.”
Born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, where his parents worked, Rabbani moved back to Karachi as a teen and was a taxi driver at the time of his detention.
rabbani” width=”1000″ height=”630″ srcset=”https://arynews.tv/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/painter-5.jpg 1000w, https://arynews.tv/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/painter-5-300×189.jpg 300w, https://arynews.tv/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/painter-5-768×484.jpg 768w, https://arynews.tv/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/painter-5-150×95.jpg 150w, https://arynews.tv/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/painter-5-600×378.jpg 600w, https://arynews.tv/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/painter-5-696×438.jpg 696w, https://arynews.tv/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/painter-5-667×420.jpg 667w” sizes=”(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px”/Fluent in Arabic, he specialised in guiding visitors from the Middle East – a factor which contributed to him being misidentified.
While imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, painting became an obsession for Rabbani, although years spent on hunger strike meant he was often too frail to even hold a brush.
If he ran out of materials, he would improvise.
“I would find and turn a piece of discarded or torn clothes into canvas,” he said.
“Sometimes I drew from coffee, sometimes from turmeric.”
In ‘The Unforgotten Moon: Liberating Art from Guantanamo Bay’, around two dozen pieces Rabbani was allowed to take from prison are on display – alongside works by local artists who have ‘re-imagined’ paintings that were confiscated.
“He is someone who has lost so much of his life, so to produce the images of this quality is a miracle… it’s remarkable,” said Natasha Malik, curator and organiser of the exhibition.
“Displayed alongside Ahmed’s