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Boston Arts Festival
The contemporary Boston Arts Festival is an annual event showcasing Boston's visual and performing arts community and promoting Boston's Open Studios program.[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.[3] The Arts Festival, which has existed in several different forms, was relaunched by former Mayor Thomas Menino in 2003, then reconceived by Mayor Marty Walsh in 2015.[4] The Beacon Hill Art Walk and Artists Crossing Gallery will be organizing the 2019 September Festival.[5]
The original Festival, briefly named the "Boston Art Festival," was held at Boston's Public Garden between 1952 and 1964.[6] That version is credited with democratizing access to the fine arts in Boston, especially for young, emerging and often Jewish-American, artists who felt shut out of Boston's famously Brahmin museums and other institutional exhibition sites. Activist artists, either linked by the Boston Museum School or the Boris Mirski Gallery founded the Boston Arts Festival. 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. This represented a major break in how art was presented in New England. 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. That exchange of ideas and influences developed into the earliest form of American Figurative Expressionism, known as Boston Expressionism.
- ^ Boston Office of the Mayor: Official Festival Site Accessed 2008-10-20
- ^ City press release Accessed 2008-10-20
- ^ "Boston Arts Festival". 2019 Boston Arts Festival. Retrieved Feb 3, 2019.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
:3was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Cite error: The named reference
:4was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ a b "Guide to the Boston Arts Festival Records" (PDF). City of Boston Archives and Records Management Division. Retrieved Feb 3, 2019.
- ^ Rosenfeld, Jerome M. "Printed material and a photograph concerning the Boston Arts Festival, 1956-1962". Archives of American Art. Retrieved Feb 3, 2019.
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