A local artist demonstrates glassblowing during Green Energy Festival in Dillsboro, Sept.20, 2014. Photo by Cory Klein.
The 12th Annual Youth Arts Festival will brighten the landscape of Green Energy Park in Dillsboro, North Carolina, once again bringing art and green energy education to children and their families.
The festival is on Sept. 21 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and is free to the public.
Guests will be able to participate in some of the traditional activities such as painting, printmaking, and glassblowing. New this year is puppet making from the lids of egg cartons.
There will also be live entertainment and food available for purchase.
Program Assistant, Chelsea Miller, said that the festival is an opportunity for memorable family moments to be preserved.
“One of the volunteers had drawn out these big chalk wings on the ground and so she set up a spot for people to kind of lay down and take pictures of whoever was laying there with the wings behind them… there was a lady who laid her little baby down and was taking pictures,” Miller said describing a moment from last year’s festival.
Green Energy Park was an old county landfill before being turned into a center for artists to rent out space and create work, hosting its first artisan in October 2006, according to a case study from Kenan Institute. The main building used to be the trash center, but now hosts works of art for sale. The park employees and volunteers use the resources from the landfill to help power forges and kilns for artisans, reusing materials and fuels that are already on-site.
For the festival, parents should dress their children in old clothes, as the activities are meant for children to have full creative freedom—even if this means splattering clay on their shirts and wiping face paint on their sleeves.
