“I am excited, I am apprehensive, I am so looking forward to experiencing the art myself,” Fourth Street Festival President Matina Celerin said.
The festivities will begin at 10 a.m. Saturday with the Bloomington Community Band hitting the Music Stage.
Storyzilla will also begin a day of poetry and storytelling on the Spoken Word Stage at 10:30 a.m.
Celerin said she and the board, a volunteer group of 16 artists, worked year-round to plan the event with meetings once a month. The first meeting after every festival serves to analyze what went well and what they’d like to change.
“This year, we wanted to have something new and interesting in the installation art area, and I think we did that,” Celerin said.
The new installation is a collection of four 5-foot-by-5-foot brains. The brains were designed by Jill Bolte Taylor, well-known for her TEDx talk “My Stroke of Insight.”
Celerin said Taylor designed the brains then found 22 local artists to embellish them, with each sponsored by a community-based organization.
With more than 100 artists represented, Grant and Dunn streets will be lined with many types of art, including clay, drawing, fiber, glass, graphics, jewelry, leather, metal, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, surface decoration, wood, and 2-D and 3-D mixed media.
Artists are chosen by juries throughout the nation, Celerin said. More than 300 apply each year, and only 120 are chosen.
“It’s a big deal to get into the show,” Celerin said. “It’s very much a national exhibition.”
Two annual awards will be given out this year with the addition of a third. The Barb Bihler Functional Potter Award is given in honor of Barb Bihler, who died in January 1999 and was skilled in ceramics.
The Alice San Pietro Award identifies excellence in watercolor and is in memory of Alice San Pietro.
The new award, the Jim Kemp Craftsmanship award, was created this year by the family of longtime Fourth Street Festival participant Jim Kemp.
“We were all very shocked at his sudden passing. His work is phenomenal,” Celerin said. “It was a huge loss to the art community as well as the art-appreciating community.”
More than 40,000 people are expected to attend the festival, and it will likely be more with this weekend’s weather forecast, Celerin said.
The booths will be set up from Indiana Avenue to the Bloomington Fire Station on Fourth Street, extending from Third Street to Kirkwood Avenue down Grant and Dunn streets.
Celerin said seeing the work artists bring inspire her to create new bodies of work and push herself in new directions.
“To be able to share this with all of Bloomington and beyond Bloomington is just wonderful,” she said.
