Fine Art & Artisans Fair
After a year off due to COVID-19, the Naperville Woman’s Club Fine Art & Artisan Fair came back for its 61st year at Naper Settlement.
“It is part of the mission of the Naperville Woman’s Club to bring art to the community in a setting where people can come out in this beautiful park, free admission, and enjoy a day of looking at beautiful art,” said Julie Cunningham, co-president of the Naperville Woman’s Club.
Vendors
This year’s event had around 90 vendors who showed off different mediums of art to the community.
“[There’s] a variety of fine art in quite a mixture of media. We’ve got painting, sculpture, print making, lots of jewelry, pottery,” said Cunningham. “Just quite a variety of types of art.”
“I cut everything individually with a hand glass cutter and I’ll put it together and I’ll tack fuse it together first in the first firing,” said glass artist Ed Martin as he described the process behind his one of his pieces. “And then I’ll come back and granulate clear glasses and then put them over just the black sections and center sections and tack fuse them to give them texture. Almost give them a watery feel to it. And I’ll build a custom mold for each one of them that I lay it over and melt it over as I [get it] to the design I want in the end.”
“We have the Empty Bowls event and that’s put on by the people of ClaySpace,” said Cunningham. “And they have donated pieces of pottery and all the proceeds from that go to a food pantry.”
Proceeds will be donated to Northern Illinois Food Bank.
Community Event
The art fair also had an interactive feature.
“The interactive features we have include the community mural. And that is a painting by one of our participating artists that we had blown up into 8×12 foot mural,” said Cunningham. “We cut it up into pieces and people can come and replicate those pieces and then we’ll put it all together.”
Cunningham said the club is happy to be back this year.
“We were just being very optimistic and positive that things would be better. So of course we were delighted on June 11 when everything opened back up again and we could have the art fair,” said Cunningham. “And I think people are happy to be out and we’re just so excited we can host our beautiful art fair again.”
Naperville News 17’s Aysha Ashley Househ reports.
