The Penn Stater Magazine

Wrapping Up the Arts Festival

July 12, 2009 at 4:46 pm Tina Hay 2 comments

Everyone around here is commenting on how lucky we are to have had such great weather for the arts festival this year. Usually it’s about 92 degrees with 99.99% humidity; instead we had temperatures in the 70s most of the week. Except for a couple of brief downpours yesterday, there was very little rain.

I thought I’d share just a few of the eight zillion photos I took over the course of the festival. One place where I spent a lot of time was the Italian Street Painting Festival on Hiester Street—I kept stopping back to see how the “paintings” (actually chalk) were coming along and to photograph the finished ones. The first shot you see here is a chalk-on-pavement rendering of a 1914 painting called “An Englishman in Moscow,” by Kasimir Malevich.

Bob Baumbach ’75, one of the organizers of the street painting festival, was nice enough to let me set up his ladder so I could shoot some of the paintings from above. He also taught me a Photoshop trick for straightening out the natural distortion that occurs in the camera and getting a more perfect rectangle.

On Saturday I checked out the Rustical Quality String Band concert on the Allen Street Stage. RQSB has been performing their zany version of old-timey music for 31 years, and they’ve become a tradition at the arts festival. The shot at the right is of band member Tim Craven ’74, who’s a minister in the Ephrata area (and, yes, he does play the guitar backwards).

And the shot at left is of Penn State Penn State President Graham Spanier, who joined the band on washboard for a few numbers, along with the band’s regular washboard player, Mick Smyer, and bass player Celia Millington-Wyckoff ’80g. Mick used to be on the faculty at Penn State and is now the provost at Bucknell; Celia works in Outreach at Penn State.

Also on Saturday, I got a call from Rick Bryant, executive director of the arts festival, who said I ought to stop up to the booth of broom-maker Marlow Gates, of Leicester, N.C. Turns out that Marlow had posted on the wall of his booth a copy of the May-June 1979 issue of The Penn Stater!

Marlow’s late father, Ralph, was also a broom-maker who had a booth at the arts festival back in the 1970s, and a photo of him (taken by then-Collegian photographer Pat Little ’77) was used for a Penn Stater story on the arts fest.

You can see a slide show of about 50 images from the arts festival—including some from the Alumni Association’s ice-cream social in the West Halls quad—by clicking on this link.

Tina Hay, editor

Entry filed under: Campus events, Graham Spanier, University Park campus. Tags: An Englishman in Moscow, Bob Baumbach, Celia Millington-Wyckoff, Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts, Friendswood Brooms, Italian street painting, Kasimir Malevich, Marlow Gates, Mick Smyer, Pat Little, Ralph Gates, Rustical Quality String Band, Tim Craven, washboard playing.