MSU Riley Center
Announces Fall-Winter Season
Headliners like Dionne Warwick (Sept. 10), plays like "The Diary of Anne Frank" (Nov. 14) and holiday glee with Manhattan Transfer Christmas Show (Dec. 2) highlight the new lineup. For tickets and information, www.msurileycenter.com

Click here to see the entire edition of Artsy Facts. Or visit our archives.

The Sun Shines on the Threefoot!
Go to the Threefoot Art Festival link here to see pics from this year's great festival and plan on attending next year's Threefoot Art Festival the first weekend in April, 2011.

Rain Didn't Dampen Threefoot Art Festival

By Byron Wilkes
Courtesy: The Meridian Star
The morning rain couldn't keep people from attending this year's Threefoot Art Festival, which combined with the Arts in the Park for the second year in a row to take place Saturday.
As noon went by, the scattered attendees soon turned to throngs of people eager to enjoy Meridian's celebration of the arts downtown, drawing 31 artists and hundreds of guests.
The event was sponsored by the Meridian Council for the Arts, and included the Make-A-Wish Foundation walk, a youth art and photography contest and a chili cook-off.
"This is our sixth annual Threefoot [Festival], even though it continues a more than 20-year tradition as we combined it with the older Arts in the Park Festival," said Debbie Martin, president of the MCA Board of Directors. "It always falls on the first weekend of April, whether it's Easter weekend or not. "This morning it was raining and people didn't come out, but we see them coming out now."
Sure enough, as puddles began to dry in the afternoon heat, more festival goers began filling the streets of downtown Meridian. The diversity of artists at the festival gave guests a breadth of different media, like music, sculpture, painting, jewelry and woodwork, to peruse and purchase.
Bessie Johnson was one of those artists, bringing her self-described "folk art" to the festival. "I'm doing pine needle, which is a... folk art, then I'm doing matchstick folk art, which.. they call 'Depression art," Johnson said. "Both take me back to some of my childhood memories." Johnson was awarded the 2010 Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts for Mississippi
Heritage, bringing her own heritage to her craft. Her father was a basket weaver, and she said her pine needle baskets and matchstick works originate in what she grew up around.
"A long time ago people did not have a whole lot, so they just took what they had and were creative with that," she said. "They didn't think of it as being artistic. They just took what they had and made due with it."
Like Johnson, other artists at the festival traced their roots back to Mississippi, like Johanna Massingale, a Meridian High School graduate who has spent much of her life in Japan learning Oshibana, the art of pressed flower designs.
"'Bana' means flower in Japanese," Massingale said. "It's very popular in Japan, but not a lot of people do this in the U.S.