The Memorial Art Gallery (MAG) hosted its 68th Clothesline Festival on Sept. 7 and 8, giving the community an opportunity to buy products directly from and interact with over 300 artists and artisans.
Kelly Cheatle, a Merit Award Judge who is long entrenched in the Rochester arts scene, has been attending the festival intermittently for roughly 20 years. This year, she picked up a collage as a gift for a friend and a couple pieces of jewelry.
“The Clothesline Festival is a historic community festival,” Cheatle said. “It’s like one of the biggest, longest running arts festivals in Rochester, and probably the one that has the most … gravitas as far as the quality of the artwork.”
Some featured artists included Rose VanTyne of Rotondi Creations selling “eclectic” pottery, including items such as little ceramic ghosts and ceramic leaves inspired by her childhood.
“When I was a child, my sister and I used to get leaves in the fall and we would put them between paper and rub them. So we’d take all these leaf rubbings and then we would take the leaves that we rubbed and we would put them between wax paper and crayons around there … and then we would melt them into the wax paper,” said VanTyne. Her sister later made concrete leaves, which led to VanTyne making ceramic ones. VanTyne is also the ceramics program specialist at the MAG’s creative workshops.
The festival also featured artists new to Clothesline; For one, Ithaca-based illustrator, Julian Plum, worked his first Clothesline this year. He works with water-soluble gouache to produce whimsical art including washi tape, stickers, prints, and original artwork.
A chunk of their work is inspired by the natural world, including one piece depicting mushrooms from New York state’s Finger Lakes.
“Ithaca and the Finger Lakes…was the first place that I chose for myself to live,” Plum said. “A big part of learning the land is learning like, what grows here, who lives on it, why they live on it, what their relationships are with each other. And so that’s something that I’m like constantly trying to explore in my work.”
This is also director of the MAG Sarah Jesse’s first time involved with Clothesline. What makes Clothesline compelling beyond even just the art on display, she said, is the artists.
“We have these great artists, we have food vendors, we have musicians, we have local nonprofits who are telling us about their great work and the resources that they offer the community,” Jesse said.
The museum, which remains open during the festival, contains a somewhat tucked away part of Clothesline: the book sale. Run by the Charlotte Whitney Allen Library, the sale offers books donated by community members and the library itself at a significantly discounted price. Manager of Academic Resources Eboni Jones Stewart explained how this is a unique opportunity for people to get ahold of books.
“Well, I mean, knowledge is power, right?” Stewart said. “And with some of these, like art history books, like a lot of art history books, are not easily accessible in public libraries, so having these available for, you know, purchase and the library upstairs is free to browse to the public, so everybody can absolutely, kind of, get their hands on these books.”
While there are some restrictions on who can borrow from the library, Stewart explained that part of the book sale is to remind the community that they exist. It’s also a fundraiser for the library.
The MAG, which was founded in 1913, also raises money through the festival. With so much to offer visitors, it is no wonder that the festival has been running for so long. The diversity of the artists and artisans who work with different mediums and sell work at various price points are what makes the festival exciting.
The Merit Awards Winners for 2024 are Justin Winters from HBT Woodworks and Bill Mowson from Fingerlake Footprints. The Exceptional First-Time Clothesline Art Festival Exhibitor title went to Dia Haffar from Smoke Pail Studios.
The name of the festival, however, gives away one minor way the festival might subvert a visitor’s expectations.
“I mean, the name Clothesline comes from artists who used to display their work on an actual clothesline,” Jesse explained. “We preserved the name. We’ve preserved the origins of it, and maybe the display techniques have gotten more sophisticated and more professional, but what we’ve preserved is this wonderful spirit of art and creativity and this community tradition.”
