Saturday, April 26 saw another iteration of Downtown Lewisburg’s annual Lewisburg Arts Festival, featuring dozens of local artisans, artists, craftspeople, vendors and artisanal food offerings. Booths and “food courts,” for which four separate areas were set up to manage crowd flow and fare selection, lined the entirety of Market Street.
Founded over 50 years ago, the Lewisburg Arts Festival is an entirely volunteer-run event, spearheaded by the Lewisburg Arts Council. This year’s volunteers numbered about 100— they begin planning in October as a Festival Committee, but their process really gets going after the New Year, and picks up all the way until the day of the event itself. Their planning has to accommodate the approximately 10,000 attendees that flock to the Festival from all over the area. Della Hutchison of the Lewisburg Arts Council describes the amount of planning that goes into the event as “astonishing”; they have to do “everything from submitting paperwork to PennDOT for permission to close Market Street for the day, to soliciting […] vendors, to working out logistical details.”
A little over half of the vendors at this year’s Festival were returning to the event. 118 were accepted to have a space; for the first time, Hutchison says, they had “a waitlist for food and beverage vendors” because they received “more applicants than [they had] space available.” Some of the vendors find the opportunity through social media or word of mouth and reach out to the Festival Committee for their spot, while others are artists native to Lewisburg who have been attending the festival from a young age. The Festival Committee also goes to “other shows” in the area and, if they “see artists whose work would be a good fit,” invites those craftspeople to apply.
When seeking out artists to set up booths at the event, Hutchison and the Committee have several qualities for which they look. All the items a given vendor offers “must be original work,” and they want to “see the artist’s hand in their creation”: the “thumbprint[s] on the pottery,” the “eye in a photograph’s perspective” and the deliberate “color and fiber choices” in hand-woven tapestries and fabrics. They also look for “artists whose booth [will show] a unified vision,” one that says the artist has perfected their craft.
Because they’re working with a limited footprint of available space—Market Street is only so big—the Festival can’t grow much beyond its current boundaries. That being said, Hutchison and other volunteers have been working to bring back “elements of the Festival” that they “haven’t been able to offer right away” following the pandemic and finally accomplished that revitalization this year.
Hutchison herself looks forward to seeing Market Street “magically transformed” into an open-air market in just a few hours and hearing people in attendance find joy in walking down the middle of the closed-off street. To her, it feels like “coming out of hibernation after the winter” and giving back to the arts community as well as Lewisburg at large, as “the money raised from the event” is used by the Arts Council to “host other events throughout the year,” extending the appreciation of the arts well beyond the actual Festival day.
Beyond the offerings during the event, Hutchison’s future goals revolve around improving the “depth chart” of the organization, “adding back-ups for key Festival personnel” to avoid “burnout” and “losing institutional memory and willing hands.” She’d love to connect with students interested in volunteer opportunities that provide real-world experience in everything from marketing to copywriting to survey analysis… as well as the day-of responsibilities of on-the-ground Festival volunteers. As it stands, though, she’s very happy with how the day turned out.
Selinda Kennedy was the featured artist at this year’s Art Festival. A resident artist at the art gallery co-op in downtown Lewisburg located at 229 Market Street, Kennedy has been an active artisan since the mid-1980s when she was “able to take advantage of an arts grant” from the Margaret Waldron Foundation. Her experience and passion lies with redware (a “low fire terracotta clay”), which has a rich historical background and is often “sought after” by historical reenactors and collectors.
Kennedy opened her own redware studio in 1986 and has been honing her craft ever since; her unique style combines her “love of early folk art motifs” with the “canvas” of redware pottery, and found an appreciative audience with reenactors up until her husband’s death in 2006, at which point she transitioned into showing her work at contemporary events. Though her work is available in gift shops as far away as Virginia, she is a steady member of the Lewisburg Arts Council and has participated in some capacity in the Festival for several years; she’s also a member of the Pennsylvania and the Berks County Guild(s) of Craftsmen. Her work was this year given a gallery exhibit during the month of April as part of her feature within the Festival.
Student artists and organizations had a presence at the Festival as well. Naomi Malone ’25 founded “Peace by Piece,” a “non-profit group” selling “student art from across campus” whose proceeds all go to support relief efforts in Palestine, Sudan and Congo. Malone’s goal with founding the non-profit, which she did with the help of Colton Beach ’27, Amanda Kalaydjian ’24 and Gana Mukhtar ’24, was to “help in any way [she] could” to put an end to the ongoing humanitarian crises. She “didn’t feel [she] knew enough about the wars to truly inform people” in the way dedicated activists do, but she thought she could “do something with art” (which she’s always loved) and “donate the money earned.”
Because the non-profit was formed in the winter of 2024, this was Malone’s first year having a table at the Arts Festival. She was largely “just excited that [they] were offered the opportunity” and is “super grateful to the campus art store and Dean Jablonski” for the chance to increase the non-profit’s “exposure.” Seeing how much Peace by Piece has grown since its inception has been “nothing but rewarding” for Malone, and she looks forward to turning it into a club for next year’s Bucknell students to engage with to continue the non-profit work.
For those who missed out on the Festival and can’t wait until next year to engage with these local artists, they can be located at the online vendor directory on the Lewisburg Arts Council website. Photos of the event and its offerings are also available for viewing.
