By Lindsay DePietro

(Above: First place Allentown Art Festival Poster Contest winner. By Jim Chariler.)

The 68th annual Allentown Art Festival is nearing, and there is a plethora of new artists to look forward to. 

There are close to 100 new artists attending the festival this year, president of the Allentown Art Festival, Rita Lippman said. 

The Allentown Art Festival will take place on Saturday, June 14 and Sunday, June 15 from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the Allentown Historic Preservation District of Buffalo.

The festival was originally started by merchants from Allentown back in 1958 and the show has grown to be one of the largest art shows in the U.S. 

Well over 100,000 people come to see the art each day.

“We really get a lot of people and especially it’s Father’s Day weekend coming up, so I think we’ll have a lot of people shopping on Saturday,” Lippman said. 

After the COVID-19, the festival became smaller. This was a widespread effect of the pandemic on businesses and events around the world.

“People weren’t ready to travel and get back into everything this entails, but they’re back, and they’re, you know, excited to talk to people,” said Lippman. She goes on to say that one of the best things about the festival is that, “you’re talking directly to the artist that made it. And you can get perspective, you can get technique.”

Not only are many of the artists back, but there are many new arrivals.

This year, St. Mary’s School for the Deaf will be in attendance. St. Mary’s students have been working on American Sign Language art and they will be selling their art pieces. 

The school will be set up near the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site on Delaware Ave.

“This is a new experience for us. We’re very excited about this because we’ve never seen anything like this,” Lippman said. 

Other schools will also be in attendance this year. This includes Buffalo State University students who will be giving pottery demonstrations and Buffalo public school students.

“We provide a grant to the Buffalo public schools for art supplies, and so the kids, the students, work on a project all year so that they can come to the show and they exhibit the projects,” Lippman said. “They often sell their pieces.”

There will be some exciting new art demonstrations for the kids this year. 

The CEPA Gallery will be at the festival this year with a dark room that kids can go into and take pictures. Corning Glass is coming for their second year, except this year they are bringing a glass blower. Glass animals will be made and raffled off to children.

Lippman believes the exact number of artists attending this year’s festival is 346. It is not the largest amount the festival has ever had, but to Lippman, it’s a great number because the bigger concern is the quality of the art, rather than the quantity of artists. 

“These art shows are a big business for people who we call buy-sell, and they just buy things and sell them. And we really don’t want that in the show. We want real artists who have created these pieces themselves,” Lippman said. 

Every individual artist is handpicked for the Allentown Art Festival each year. Not every artist who completes a submission is accepted.

Lippman explains that they have a jury of five people that changes every year, that is “not affiliated with us.” She says the jury is mostly made up of professors from the area, gallery owners and artists. The jury looks at the artist’s submissions and scores them. The artists are then chosen based on their given score. 

The artists pay a fee to be included in the show, “but we keep the price very reasonable because we want artists to apply,” Lippman said. 

She went on to say that the Allentown Art Festival is a nonprofit organization, so all the funds from the event are given to the community in the form of donations. Every individual who works at the festival is a volunteer. 

“We offer scholarships to Western New York high school students who are going to college who are going to major in art” and they give “donations to various groups that are working with children. And there’s a program for it called the New York State Summer School for the Arts. We provide them with a grant also,” Lippman said.

“This year we gave out $30,000 in scholarships,” she added. 

The financial impact of the Allentown Art Festival is huge for the community. Not only because of the donations, but because of all the revenue it brings to the city.

“The hotels are full, both with artists and also with people who come from out of town to come to the show” and “the restaurants will do great business,” Lippman said.

Lippman encourages people who come to Allentown to enjoy the show to also go and explore the shops on Allen Street and even have lunch there. 

“It’s just a great section, a great neighborhood. It’s historic. And the show was started by merchants from Allentown way back in 1958 so that’s where our roots are, and we really want to be a strong supporter of the Allentown community,” said Lippman 

The forecast may show some showers this weekend, but the festival will go on rain or shine.