• What: The “tinth” annual Recycled Arts Festival will feature 160 artists, information about recycling and waste, music and entertainment, and activities for everyone.
• When: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, June 27, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, June 28.
• Where: Esther Short Park, 301 W. Eighth St.
• Admission: Free.
• On the web: recycledartsfestival.com
• Bring a reusable bottle: People who show that they’ve brought reusable vessels — instead of buying disposable plastic ones — will be entered into two gift-card drawings.
Joe Clifton’s life changed with one sketchy five-minute welding lesson. That’s about how much patience his dad had, Clifton said. But young Clifton, age 14, was already eager to make new beauty out of the distinctly unbeautiful piles of discarded equipment littering the family farm in West Virginia, he said.
• What: The "tinth" annual Recycled Arts Festival will feature 160 artists, information about recycling and waste, music and entertainment, and activities for everyone.
• When: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, June 27, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, June 28.
• Where: Esther Short Park, 301 W. Eighth St.
• Admission: Free.
• On the web:recycledartsfestival.com
• Bring a reusable bottle: People who show that they've brought reusable vessels — instead of buying disposable plastic ones — will be entered into two gift-card drawings.
Years later, Clifton was busy working as a metal artist when he returned to that early idea of “repurposing” old items into new ones. (He wanted to impress his new girlfriend, he said, who was admiring another artist’s knack for recycling.) He took a load of his recycled metal products to an art show — and watched them sell faster than anything he’d ever done before, he said.
It’s great that people love the idea of recycled art, he said. But it’s even greater when they so admire your work that they don’t even realize that it’s made of secondhand stuff. “That’s the greatest compliment,” he said.
When Clark County started cooking up the idea of a whole Recycled Arts Festival of its own, a decade ago, Clifton was glad to be in on the ground floor. The first festival was pretty meager, he and organizer Sally Fisher agreed, with something like 30 artists participating — but what it lacked in big numbers it more than made up in passion.
“It was a really small group that was obviously serious about it,” Clifton said. “It was pretty exciting.”
Fisher said the motivation behind it all was revving up interest in what seemed like a pretty dry subject. “We thought this would be a really fun way of bringing people together around waste reduction and the environment,” she said. “It’s hard to get people to come to a garbage workshop.”
Ten years later, Clark County’s Recycled Arts Festival is a celebrated trend-setter; Clifton, who attends lots of weekend art festivals, said it’s the biggest one of its kind that he knows of. According to Fisher, 30,000 people came out last year to delight in the bewildering variety of ingenious artworks and sculptures, clothing and jewelry, housewares and furniture, toys and gizmos — not to mention some imagination creations that just don’t have names.
This year, there will be 160 artists and expanded Saturday hours in which to meet them and their wares. You can also tour an 84-square-foot “tiny house” and consider the simple, environmentally friendly lifestyle therein.
“It’s such a fun and interesting group of people to work with,” Fisher said. “These people take what we think of as garbage and make such amazing things. You walk around the park and you just can’t help but be inspired.”
If he only had a heart
Ten years of passion and inspiration is worth a special celebration, Fisher figured, and she was aware that tin is the traditional material for a 10th anniversary gift. So the festival, which is a program of Clark County’s Environmental Services department, commissioned Clifton to make a tin man for this year’s event.
Clifton’s tin man is ready for his star turn — except for one crucial thing. While festival participants and visitors surely will show huge hearts for recycling and for art, this tin man has no heart. So, all festival artists were asked to try supplying him one.
All hearts will be on display and up for a popular vote, Fisher said; the winning one will stay with the new festival mascot for hearty future appearances, while all the rest will be donated to the American Heart Association for an auction next year. Meanwhile, you’ll also be able to vote for your favorite creation in the sculpture garden. Kids — and grown-ups — will be able to dig through “tossed-and-found” items and try to make something onsite.
Plus, there will be music on the Esther Short Park stage, roving entertainment like jugglers and stilt walkers, and plenty of food to purchase (that’s not recycled — or is it?).
You might even learn something about recycling while you’re there. Fisher said county customers are justifiably puzzled about the complicated business of curbside recycling — what does and doesn’t go in the big blue bin, and why — so there will be lots of good information on hand. Or, just visit recycledartsfestival.com for the whole rundown.
“It’s confusing, but people are doing a pretty darned good job,” Fisher said.
