Art City Austin with Asa Hursh
/"An authentic Austin tradition
that celebrates the community through the arts."
Austin’s original fine arts festival and national juried art show Art City Austin builds on 65 years of success with an improved location, new programming and 200 local and nationally recognized artists and galleries. This year’s dates have been announced for Friday, April 29, Saturday, April 30 and Sunday, May 1, 2016. After the past seven years of calling Cesar Chavez home, Art City Austin, formerly known as Fiesta, has relocated to the beautiful and scenic Palmer Events Center along the shores of Lady Bird Lake downtown, located at 900 Barton Springs Rd., Austin, Texas 78704.
The reception will celebrate Art City Austin’s newest programming addition Art City Fair presented by Tito’s Handmade Vodka. Art City Fair will be a highly curated contemporary art area that will showcase galleries from across Texas as well as self-represented artists displaying work on large gallery walls, similar to national art fairs. Art City Fair will feature traditional art fair style booths including 10' white walls and mounted lighting.
Asa Hursh the Executive Director of Art Alliance Austin says, “We are extremely thrilled to offer this incredible opportunity to our community and bring the very first art fair to Austin.”
Read below to check out the talent showcased during Art City Austin and what Hursh has in store for the event!
Why the new location at Palmer Events Center?
We wanted to make the experience better for our patrons. There’s a lot of differences to being on the grounds of event center to being in the middle of a street – especially when we were dealing with so much construction downtown at the 2nd St extension. The Palmer gives us more parking, more shade, more grass, indoor restrooms, air conditioning, a less linear footprint. Plus, while most of our artists are exhibiting outside, some are moving inside. We think that moving between the indoors and outdoors will allow our guests to spend a longer time at the festival – because there are more places to recharge. And that means that they can enjoy all of what we have to offer: original artwork in a variety of media ranging from the traditional to the contemporary, kids activities and programs brought by our cultural partners, great things to eat and drink, and full days of music on the Black Fret Music Stage, which feature Austin’s most exciting musicians.
What does Art City Austin have to offer this year that it did not offer in previous years?
Well, the location is huge. And the new venue has allowed us to add more programming and programming that simply wasn’t available on the street. Specifically, more galleries and more contemporary art. Last year we piloted this concept with the Austin Art Pavilion and large pavilion with gallery walls and lighting the housed work from several Austin galleries: CAMIBAart Gallery, Pump Project, Co-Lab Project, Tiny Park Gallery, and Wally Workman Gallery. This year, that moves inside the Palmer and we’re adding more galleries and not just from Austin but from around Texas. Art City Austin is this city’s original fine arts festival and it’s the biggest art marketplace in central Texas – this new programing brings additional talent to the fair, expands that marketplace, and shows that even though this festival dates back to 1950, it continues to evolve along with Austin. We couldn’t be more excited about this.
