'Stars Align' For 2-Day Weston Fine Arts Festival

WESTON, CT — The first annual Weston Fine Arts Festival will kick off this weekend, featuring over a hundred juried atists' booths, crafts, food, children’s art activities and continuous live music

"It's like the stars all aligned up," Patricia Perez-Goodrich, chair of WestonArts and the event's organizer, told Patch.

She said the event is actually the product of some art show envy.

"I've always loved the Westport Fine Arts show," Goodrich said. "And I thought, 'why doesn't Weston do this'"? She was appointed arts commissioner in Weston in 2015, and she has been wanting to pull a festival like this one together ever since.

Goodrich interviewed every artist in the Westport show to find out "what they needed" to come to Weston, and said she was surprised by their answers.

"Every single one of them said, 'we want to pay a fee, and we want it to be juried,'" according to Goodrich. "And nobody wanted to set up for just one day, it had to be a weekend event."

Goodrich said she had finally gotten all the ducks, if not necessarily the stars, aligned to mount the show in July 2020, but the coronavirus pandemic made that impossible.

"There are so many art enthusiasts in Weston," Goodrich said. "Most of the entertainers are young adults whom I have watched grow up, go through the music and theater systems here in the schools, so to watch them step into themselves is so gratifying."

One of those art enthusiasts and entertainers is Weston resident Jose Feliciano. He and his family will be performing at the festival's ribbon-cutting ceremony on Saturday at 2 p.m., in the "Light My Fire" singer's first post-pandemic appearance.

The Weston Fine Arts Festival will run Saturday and Sunday, July 17-18, from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the fairgrounds behind Hurlbutt Elementary School at 9 School Road, and is free to the public.