AN EDUCATION AND A FESTIVAL ALL IN ONE SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE Date: Friday, July 9, 1999 Section: Source: By LINDA SEEBACH Scripps Howard News Service Memo: Advance for Sunday release (Linda Seebach is an editorial columnist for the Denver Rocky Mountain News.) Edition: DENVER - Before I tell you about the Cherry Creek Arts Festival in Denver, I have to confess that I am a word person, not a visual person. I learned to read earlier than I can remember, and if I go to a museum or a gallery I'm liable to find myself reading the captions and forgetting to look at the pictures. It's an agreeable diversion, but regrettably little more. Perhaps that's why what impressed me the most about the Cherry Creek festival is its commitment to outreach to young people especially, so they don't grow up as artistically impaired as I am. Arts festivals are big almost everywhere, but Cherry Creek is among the biggest and best. Now in its ninth year, it took over the streets of Cherry Creek North during the July 4th weekend, drawing an estimated 350,000 people. The 200 exhibitors include 14 first-place winners from last year, and the remaining 186 are competitively, very competitively, chosen from some 2,300 applicants. More than a third of the exhibitors were new this year. Of course you could just walk past the art, and go for the food and the music. The 20 restaurants in as many different categories that participate in "Art of the Menu" make up the most exotic food court you've ever seen (I had Vietnamese and Thai). Music on the three performance stages is equally eclectic. My sampler included Opera Colorado - I'm sure I've never seen a standing ovation in a beer garden before - Irish dancing and a singer named Patty Larkin whom everyone else in the crowd apparently had heard of. But you probably wouldn't want to walk on by. In the ArtZone, people were gleefully painting in the outlines of black-and-yellow bumblebees on 10 new buses belonging to the local rapid-transit agency, or composing giant refrigerator-magnet poetry, or building their own millennium bugs out of scraps of computer innards. I don't know whether that's art, but it certainly looked like fun. The ArtZone and other activities are staffed mostly by volunteers, more than 1,200 of them this year, said Bruce Storey, general manager of the festival. I asked him about the young people serving as docents at the Mobile Art Collection. "Those children are wonderful," Storey said. The Mobile Art Collection, established last year, is a touring exhibition of works by festival artists, purchased with money from a grant from the mutual-fund company Janus. The collection buys works from the Student Arts Festival, too, but not many because, as Storey said, "parents don't want to part with them." During the past year the collection has visited several middle schools for a two-week stay. Interested students in each school are trained as docents, and they staff the collection at the festival. This summer the collection will go to Lookout Mountain youth prison in Golden, Col., Storey said, though the docent training may not be part of that visit. The collection has been booked solid, Storey said, and in order to bring it to a wider audience it will eventually be extended to two complete exhibits. Other educational efforts in Denver include a three-year after-school arts enrichment program for at-risk students recently concluded at Ebert Elementary School, and one being planned for Holm Elementary. "We want to encourage schools to relate arts to the curriculum," Storey said. The goal of the festival's outreach programs, according to a flier I picked up at the Mobile Art Collection, is "engagement in the creative arts experience and growth of future arts audiences." They're right to be enthusiastic about that, but sometimes the enthusiasm overflows, as in one description of a school program that lets students "develop enhanced problem-solving skills, self-confidence and discipline while exploring a variety of arts mediums and creating their own artistic masterpieces." Kindergarten to third grade masterpieces? I don't think so. The festival honors not only art, but commerce. Total art sales at the 1998 festival were $2.6 million. I told Storey I had seen some pieces I would be happy to live with, and some I could afford, but unfortunately there wasn't any overlap between the two categories. He asked whether I had been to the silent auction. It contained more than 80 works donated by exhibiting artists, including several first-place winners, and raised more than $22,000 which goes toward the festival's outreach programs. "The auction lets you see how other people value art," Storey said. I do, I guess; it's just that I'm not very good at it. But I had a good time anyway, and I expect I'll give it another try next year.