Mill Avenue Brings out a Different Kind of Crowd with Art Festival

Tempe, AZ – The 41st annual Tempe Festival of the Arts took over the streets of Downtown Tempe last weekend where 450 national and local artists came together to create a street gallery of diverse art, photography, sculpture, music, food and other creations.

Mill Avenue saw a different crowd at the festival in comparison to its nightlife college crowd going from bar to bar, instead there were families and art enthusiasts roaming from booth to booth to look at the variety of art the festival had to offer.

Artists from 27 states set up booths in the Mill Avenue area, competing in 18 categories of art including painting and sculpture to ceramics and glass, woodworking and photography to leather and jewelry.

Each artist had his or her own booth where they could greet people and answer questions about their art to the public.

The winner from the fall 2008 painting category, Jerrod Eastman who is from Bozeman, Mont. but grew up in North Phoenix, was chosen as this year’s featured artist.

With the best booth at the event, which was centrally localized at Fifth Street and Mill Avenue, and with his art all over event posters, Eastman explained his art to onlookers that featured an underwater hippopotamus on red skates.

Eastman said he is self taught and has been painting his whole life bringing inspiration for his surrealist images from music, skateboard culture, “spontaneity and pure ridiculousness.”

The festival had it’s own sense of community as many of the artists have run into each other before or have even learned from each other at previous shows.

Kevin Eslinger, a pop-surrealist oil painter from Denver, Co. said that he had gone to these kinds of art shows as a high school student when he first became interested in painting in the mid-90s.

“There are very few shows that bring up to a quarter-million people together nowadays,” said Eslinger. “It brings everyone out and everyone seems to know people, it also gives me a chance to see other people’s work and learn more.”

Eslinger said he had originally worked in toy designing but when his creativity was stumped due to office politics and profit margins he decided to venture out into his own category of art where he would take well known pop-icons and do his own take on them.

Eslinger’s centerpiece was a portrait of Ronald McDonald, a young man with modern long hair and his clothes slightly tattered with smudges of makeup and an apathetic face.

“Working as an artist fulltime is fun with what I do because I get commissioned to work on characters I maybe never would have noticed before,” Eslinger said. “I have the most fun when I do create my own characters from my head because then it is all me.”

Sarah Porter, a senior at Arizona State University and a local jewelry and bead artist was not presenting at the festival but was glad to come out and support other local artists while look for inspiration in her own brand.

“I started my own line of jewelry back in high school and although it is not at the levels of the artists here at the festival, it is great to see what I can strive to work for,” Porter said. “Artists in the local communities get to know each other very well because we have the same interests and rely on each other for support.”

Joe and Mackie Clifton from Vancouver, Wash., is a married couple that work together in the art of sculpting recycled metals were in another booth across from Eslinger.

Joe Clifton said that both he and his wife Mackie had come from families that farmed while growing up and were familiar with using farm equipment so their inspiration for using old materials is how they started their business about 25 years ago.

Joe Clifton said 75 percent of the materials they use are recycled metals that they sculpt to resemble things in nature.

“For us these festivals are very much like a community because it exposes a lot of people to art they don’t even realize is around them,” said Joe Clifton. “It’s definitely an education process, we can turn a broken shovel into something someone can enjoy for the rest of their lives as opposed to leaving it in a landfill forever.”

The festival brought together more than 280,000 people over the weekend when temperatures dropped into the low 50s and clouds loomed through out the day.

Eastman, who was this year’s featured artist, said, “This is my sixth year doing art full time and up until now, it has been good enough to pay my mortgage. It’s great because I am doing what I love and although it is the hardest lifestyle, it’s the best for me.”

Guest article contributed by Omar Zamora, Student.
Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication