On display: Art Festival on Walnut Street

Shadyside’s main drag may have been shut down last weekend, but over a hundred artists created their own traffic as the 15th annual Art Festival on Walnut Street brought art-makers and art- lovers together.

“People don’t smile at something coming out of an assembly line, but something like this [art] – they smile, they laugh” said artist Beverly Adams-Hoover, 46, of Washington County, Pa.

Howard Alan Events hosted the festival, which ran from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. 

“We [Howard Alan Events] produce almost 90 events a year,” said Marketing and Administrative Coordinator Allison Shelto in an e-mail to The Duke. “Our events have anywhere in between 120 – 220 exhibitors.” These exhibitors are not only given the chance to show off their talents to people all over the nation, but also make a profit when buyers purchase these works of art.

Jenn Cole, 31, of Youngstown, Ohio, is as passionate as all the rest and takes pride in her career as an acrylic painter.

“I prefer abstract – I paint what I feel, instead of what I see,” said Cole. “I paint every day.”

Cole’s artwork featured painted canvases of rich purples and natural greens.

Other artists share the same drive as Cole.

“I paint forty hours a week, I paint everyday” said Jim Studeny, 51, of Bloomfield “You become intimate with your paintings”.

Studeny is an acrylic painter. He also creates his own versions of old paintings. “I am trying to revitalize the art and make it live on for ten thousand years,” Studeny said. “I work with archival pieces that need to be touched up from the 1500s to the 1930s.”

Darrin Hoover, 46, of Columbus, got his start in art when he was 12. “I started silk screening t-shirts and I sold them,” he said.

Hoover shared his Vestige Collection at the festival. His exhibit provided an atmosphere that was very 1940’s, with music playing of an era long gone and a set up that made one feel quite at home.

“I embrace home. This [art] is a home décor business,” Hoover said. The atmosphere also spoke for itself as to the kind of inspirations he pulled from for his art pieces “Old advertising inspired me and I used to believe I was born in the wrong era, but now I don’t believe that – I can visit it in a new way”. All of his pieces were on wood panels and looked like an old advertisement one would find in an old newspaper from seventy years ago – “I do mixed media on wood panel” Hoover said.

Adams-Hoover, who creates animal sculptures out of metal materials, does not find it preferable to call her work sculpture.

“Some people call it sculpture, but I prefer the term feragami,” Adams-Hoover said. “I create three-dimensional metal art in the form of beloved animals.” She added that she had only been working with metal art forms for two years.

“I taught myself how to weld” she said with a smile.

Many of the artists do not have second jobs; their art is their career.

“This is my job” said Elissa Brown, 28, a mixed media artist from Texas. “The people at this festival work really hard to make a living.”