June 10, 1977: Allentown Art Festival

Another skirmish in the eternal war between creativity and commerce. Looking at this now, I wonder why it wasn’t a Gusto cover story. 

June 10, 1977  

Art Festival 

Allentown’s may be one of the largest in the country. Beyond sheer popularity exists a certain amount of controversy. 

          Strollers of all ages, styles and tastes will throng the ancient streets of Buffalo’s Allentown district tomorrow and Sunday for what has become one of the oldest and biggest outdoor arts and crafts shows in America.

          The 20th annual Allentown Art Festival will be a little different from previous years, however. The organizers, a core of about 20 volunteers from the Allentown Village Society, have for the first time set entry standards.

          This year prospective exhibitors – and there were more than 700 of them from 22 states, including California – were required to send in two photo slides of their best work. A pair of judges were brought to town to spend a weekend with a slide projector. They chose the best 470.

          The move was in response to growing complaints of a decline in quality of the exhibits during recent years. Nevertheless, the area’s serious painters and sculptors tend to snub the show.

          Meanwhile, a group of local craftsmen are so intent on getting their works onto the festival site that they considered the risk of being arrested.

          The bottom-line response to any criticism of the festival and its selection processes is that the Allentown Village Society is, after all, a volunteer operation.

          It has been built by dedicated Allentown residents, many of them career professionals, who devote themselves tirelessly to the work involved in this annual event.

          The president this year is an attorney with offices in Allentown and a home a few blocks away, Sean D. M. Hill. He has been active in the AVS for five years and, as president, is in charge of the overall operation of the festival.

          Hill also was concerned about the downward drift in quality and believes that this year’s selection system weeded out such kitsch items as paintings on velvet.

          “It’s still not going to be an elite show,” he explains. “It’s not the Albright-Knox. But it should be a better show this year for the artists, the craftspeople and the folks who come.”

          Special pains were taken to hold down what has become a burgeoning number of craft entries, Hill adds.

          “We started out with a quota in mind – 70 percent art, 30 percent crafts,” he says. “We wound up pretty close to that.”

          What didn’t make it? Items that weren’t made by the exhibitor. Items deemed “too commercial” and items that didn’t fit into the festival’s entry categories.

          One group of craft applicants who weren’t accepted were blacksmiths. The committee felt a smithy wouldn’t fit into the standard exhibition plot. Another group that was rejected is a trio of young craftsmen who create ornamental wooden tables and wall objects.

          Michael Gilmartin and David Van Nostrand, who have studios on Buffalo’s West Side, and Russell Walsh, whose studio is in Orchard Park, butted heads with festival organizers last year over a display they set up without a permit at a gas station at Franklin and Allen streets.

          They have exhibited in Rochester’s art festival and other arts and crafts shows around the country. But this is their home and they want the public here to see their work. What’s more, the illicit display last year provided Van Nostrand with contacts that accounted for 80 percent of his 1976 income.

          What burns them even more is that festival officials say their work is furniture. They say it is art.

          “The question is artistic interpretation of a medium, versus just the presentation of a medium,” Van Nostrand says, pushing forward a color photo of a sensuous, hand-shaped cedar table which was rejected for this year’s Allentown Art Festival.

          The three obtained blessings from Buffalo sculptor Larry Griffis (“They are not mass manufactured and, in my opinion, not at all commercial, even though they are desirable objects to collect,” he wrote to the AVS.), but said they ran into delays, unanswered phone calls and buckpassing when they tried to take their case to festival officials.

          Finally, last Friday, AVS president Hill sent Gilmartin a letter saying it was too late for this year.

          Gilmartin, Van Nostrand and Walsh got away with last year’s illegal display because there was no city regulation strong enough to force them out. This year the 1973 law has been revised.

          No unauthorized display is allowed within several blocks of the festival area. Violators may be fined and their work impounded.

          The three considered blatant disobedience, but finally arranged to consign their pieces to an Allentown merchant. Their work will be on display indoors at 63 Allen St., not far from the gas station.

          Allentown painter Ran Webber is the kind of guy you picture when you think of an artist. Energetic and full of prankish ideas, he’s the man responsible for those colorful geometric murals that have popped up on walls around Allentown for the past couple of years.

          Sometimes he’s come out in the middle of the night to execute a surprise design. One of his ideas is to artistically unify the commercial clutter of Allentown.

          One thought is to run a continuous stripe through the area. Another is a series of street markers which soon will be erected at prime sites.

          He stops laying out a geometric design on a building and fence on Allen near Elmwood Avenue to explain why he’s going to sit out the festival in his studios – Gallery Wilde on Franklin Street just north of Allen.

          “Showing art outdoors is a romantic notion that came over from Paris,” he says. “I think it’s necessary in the development of an artist, but I don’t think serious artists are served well by taking their art outside.”

          “I exhibited a few years ago in Lewiston and I wouldn’t do it again,” says Dale Hartman, a painter who works with Webber. “The only people who make any money are craftsmen and jewelers. Besides, it’s so crowded you can’t see the work.

          “It’s too easy to get things damaged, too,” Hartman adds. “There’s a danger of getting your work rained on. In Lewiston, I had a 17-foot-wide mural get blown over by the wind. I had to lash it to a building.”

          Within these pros and cons, the festival stands as one of the irreplaceable happy public events which make city life more delightful. Whether this year’s changes will mean that it succeeds artistically too – well, that’s for the judges and you, the spectators, to decide.

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IN THE PHOTO: Woodworker Michael Gilmartin’s “Gilmartin Chair” in the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

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FOOTNOTE: Ran Webber, real first name Randall, became famous for those murals in Allentown (they covered up graffiti) and was favored by the AVS, which hired him under a federal grant to write a guide book and history of the neighborhood. He did still more throughout the city in the 1980s as artist in residence for Buffalo Arts Development Services.

By the time four of his works were accepted for the 2005 Florence Bienniale, he was doing fresco paint on paper. Buffalo Rising reported, “At a point in their creation they are put out in the environment, often floated in rivers and streams during his outdoor kayaking adventures, then completed once they have undergone a ‘baptism’ in which they are soaked, crumpled, dissolved and often torn.”

According to his bio on the Burchfield Penney Art Center website, he has worked since those days as an architectural and engineering designer. He proposed turning the Buffalo Skyway into a multi-use structure, sort of like certain European bridges, with many facets, including a Great Lakes aquarium and a gallery row.

Michael Gilmartin, who had a MFA from the University at Buffalo, moved to Atlanta shortly after this and got his furniture recognized as art, notably the award-winning “Gilmartin Chair.” His New York Times death notice from 2016 reported that his work is in a number of museums.

David Van Nostrand works in wood in Mecklenburg, not far from Ithaca, and delights in making furniture from unusual material.

“What I’m looking for,” he told the Ithaca Times in 2013, “are things nobody wants. I’m looking for disfigured things, the rotten, hollowed-out trees with scar tissue.” He added that he’s never bought wood from a lumber yard.   

Russell Walsh stayed in Orchard Park, where he operated Liberty Woodcraft on North Benzing Road and went commercial. A company profile in 2000 said he adopted the resin process from the surfboard industry and started applying the stuff to old World War II Liberty Ship hatch covers, which became collectors’ items. This led to manufacturing tables for restaurants and counters for bars, with several national chain accounts. He died in 2005.