As I wrote some time ago, the pure arts festivals in and around Los Angeles are having a hard time of it in recent years. Low attendance, few sales, disheartened artists and craftspeople.
The city of Burbank, however, put together three festivals this last weekend on San Fernando Road that turned into one very dynamic event.
The Earthday part of this festival was an ode to plastic and cilantro. Sponsored by the Burbank Public Works Dept., there was a long tent covered with plastic bags–the bags that are now banned in many cities in California and the U.S..
(As an aside: the plastic bag ban is turning into a nice source of revenue for stores. If a shopper wants to buy a paper bag to carry groceries home, it costs ten cents. City council people all across California, no doubt, feel really good about this: cleaning up the environment and helping businesses sneakily increase profits, too!)
But I digress…inside the Earthday plastic bag tent children were given small terracotta pots to paint and then cilantro seeds to plant in the pots. It will be time for salsa in about a month!
The CTN Animation Expo is a relative new-comer, but added an interesting group of people to the mix that wandered along San Fernando Road — much younger and much hipper than the typical arts fair attendees.
There are several animation studios, including Disney and the Cartoon Network, in Burbank and nearby which makes this the ideal location for the event where young animators sold their own artwork. The mascot for the Animation Festival was a skater girl. I suspect she was a cosplay character, but not one that I recognize. She doesn’t look like a Disney princess, however.
The Burbank Arts and Crafts Festival which spread along three blocks has been around for years and years but as attendance fell and vendors became discouraged and failed to show up, the city came up with this multi-event to continue to attract people–shoppers–to downtown Burbank.
Oh, and there was the regular Saturday Burbank Farmers market about a block away to add to the mix.
Rather than tell you more about all this, I’ll show you some of what there was to see.
The weekend began early Saturday morning with artists setting up booths to display paintings, photographs and many types of crafts at the Fair.
