Boston Arts Festival
[1][2] The weekend-long Festival at Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park features a wide variety of arts and high-end crafts, including painting, photography, ceramics, jewelry, sculpture and live music.
The first Festival debuted on June 12, 1952,[6][7] and displayed fine art in tents in the Public Garden, and provided free performances in nearby Boston Common.
No longer confined to the monied and the elite, the early Festivals provided avant garde artists with a forum in which to show their work, compete and interact with one another.
Artists like Hyman Bloom, Karl Zerbe, Ben Shahn, Jack Levine, Joyce Reopel, Mel Zabarsky and began gathering to discuss fears "that the Institute would ... become a showcase for ... something quite different that what we thought it ought to show and support," Arthur Polonsky said later.
Zerbe's experience with Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, which only "owned one watercolor, and at a time when his work was being acquired quite seriously, with pleasure, by some of the other institutions,"[8] stoked those fears.
"[8] In their work, the artists were, critic Adam Zucker writes, "inspired largely by political and/or social issues and conflicts.
"Despite a young new director, Perry T. Rathbone (July 3, 1911 – Jan. 15th, 2000), who was intent on making the Museum of Fine Arts more progressive that did not extend to embracing the dominantly Jewish Boston Expressionists.
The work of Jews, immigrants or their sons, like the Lebanese/American Gibran, showed with gallerist Boris Mirski or his former assistants Hyman Swetzoff and Alan Fink of Alpha Gallery.
An attempt to revive it decades later was embarrassed when the theft of a painting by Barney Rubenstein occurred because of a lack of security.
The festival drew huge crowds to the newly re-designed Christopher Columbus Park on Boston’s Waterfront.
Highlights of the event included lively performances by Boston Lyric Opera, performing Italian arias, La Piñata presenting folkloric dance, the Mayor’s Mural Crew offering interactive mural painting and watercolor exercises, and reports from some visual artists of record-breaking sales.
The Festival was expanded to two days in 2004, with highlight performances from Boston Ballet and Jazz Hip Hop Orchestra, and huge crowd attendance.
Visual artists were now able to exhibit and sell their work on Friday while special guests Blue Man Group and Buffalo Tom entertained audiences from the Waterfront Stage.
Plans for the 2019 Festival note that it will be organized by "Beacon Hill Art Walk and Artists Crossing Gallery, and will launch Boston’s Arts Open Studios season featuring more than 70 juried local visual artists and craftspeople, plus local musicians performing on the Waterfront Stage throughout the day.
