Has ImageArts Festival returns

By MIKE RICHESON

Bigfork Eagle

The 29th Bigfork Festival of the Arts is set for this weekend, bringing more than 130 vendors from across the United States. Booths will once again stretch along Electric and Grand Avenues on Saturday and Sunday.

About 5,000 to 6,000 people attend the festival each year to purchase from a selection of arts, crafts and food.

The festival is put on by the Bigfork Chamber of Commerce as a fund-raiser. A jury sorts through applications every year to determine who will receive a coveted booth. Not just anyone can show up and hok their wares.

Festival hours will run from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. every day, but the streets will be shut down from 6 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. Traffic is not allowed from the UPS store on Grand Avenue to La Provance. There will be access for emergency vehicles and downtown residents, but cars will be towed if found in restricted areas.

Shuttles will be running both days from the Bigfork High School parking, Bethany Lutheran Church and Potoczny Field.

The annual show is one of the reasons Bigfork is known as "One of the 100 Best Small Art Towns in America." Local shops and galleries will remain open during the festival as well.

For more information about the festival, contact the chamber at 837-5888 or visit www.bigforkfestivalofthearts.com.

One artist who is excited to return to the festival is former Bigfork resident Richard Nevels, helped launch the first festival in 1978. During the first event, Nevels sold ice cream from the empty lot that was then home to "Toole's Tipi" and that became the Bigfork Summer Playhouse.

Nevels is now celebrating his 25th anniversary as a professional beachcomber and as the creator of False Bay Boxes, one-of-a-kind bandsaw boxes carved from San Juan Island driftwood.

False Bay Boxes has participated in the best juried art shows and been represented by art and fine woodworking galleries throughout the West.

The proposal for the first Festival of the Arts came in May 1978. George and Elna Darrow, Jim Manley, Gerald and Sally Akevold, Don Thompson, David Shaner and Jeff Wilson started a conversation on Electric Avenue about a summer-season gathering in downtown. The idea of an arts and crafts festival stuck.

Shaner, a member of the Montana Arts Council, applied for and won a small grant for the project. The money allowed for a small stipend for Jim Manley to organize the festival and pay for advertising and a banner.

The first festival was a success, and the group decided to make it an annual event.

Twenty-nine years and hundreds of dedicated volunteers later, the annual show has become a summer tradition for thousands of people in the Northwest. Although the money from the event goes to the Bigfork Chamber of Commerce (now the host), the first beneficiary of the Festival was the building fund for the Bigfork Summer Playhouse.

The Playhouse fund became the Bigfork Center for the Performing Arts Foundation, and money brought in by the festival helped pay for the Performing Arts Center in the 1980s, along with establishing a permanent trust fund for the building's maintenance.

In 1995, Larry Jochim, the BCPA Foundation president, contacted the Bigfork Retail Merchants Association - which was a sub committee of the Chamber of Commerce - and asked the members if they would be interested in taking over the festival duties.

The BRMA decided in favor of the idea, and put the money raised by the annual show toward advertising community events, sponsoring local programs and funding a high school scholarship program.