A girl makes slime at Victoria Shufelt’s tent in Dillsboro, Sept. 21, 2019. Photo by Samantha Lughart.
Children and their parents bounced from booth to booth at the 12th annual Youth Arts Festival, creating art and enjoying fun in the sun in Green Energy Park, Dillsboro.
Around 30 volunteers were stationed in various areas of the park Sept. 21 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., offering free activities to guests including face painting, blowing bubbles, chalk drawing and slime making.
Victoria Shufelt, a volunteer at the slime making tent and owner of Viva Arts Studio in Sylva, said her favorite part of the festival was watching children and their families come together to get involved in art and have firsthand experiences, something she said is rare now in school systems.
Most tents offered some sort of art activity, except for the first one guests passed on their way into the park: the carnivorous plants tent. There, Darwin Thomas, a horticultural hobbyist for 30 years, had several plants such as Venus flytraps set out and for sale.
“I always enjoy the children, they really like these, especially the flytraps. That’s really the big reason I come every year, it’s because of the kids,” Thomas said.
A shipment container painted with the Youth Arts Festival 2019 acronym in Dillsboro, Sept. 21, 2019. Photo by Samantha Lughart.
Green Energy Park is a revamped county landfill that is now home to local artisans who rent studios there. The park also has a gallery and hosts various art classes by artists from the surrounding area. While the main building of the park used to be the trash transfer center, it now has studios for practices that use a lot of energy, such as blacksmithing, glassblowing and pottery.
Program Assistant, Chelsea Miller said the goal of the reconstruction project was to use materials that were already onsite to fuel the equipment for the studios.
“We have a blacksmithing studio that has three forges and a foundry that all run off of methane from the landfill, they’re the only ones in the world that we know of that are like that,” Miller said.
The Youth Arts Festival is meant to help engage younger children in the arts, showing them different practices and allowing them to explore their creativity. Volunteers from the surrounding area introduce children to activities such as spinning clay on a pottery wheel, weaving bookmarks on small looms and making bugs from egg cartons.
The 2019 Youth Arts Festival brought art and joy to the children that visited, many of them leaving with painted faces and crafts in hand.
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