The Fort Qu’Appelle Mid-Summer’s Art Festival is a one-day event on July 30 combining artisan booths with live music, a children’s area, a beer and wine garden, and a food court full of food trucks.
The festival is Saturday, July 30 at The Fort on Boundary Avenue next to Echo Lake Beach. Admission is $4 plus a food bank donation – if you can – and children under 12 are free.
Vendors are restricted to artisans who make their own work — no re-selling — but at the same time, it is open to any artists at all, said Julie Bedel, the festival’s chairperson. This year she expects to see around 60 vendors.
Varieties will include paintings from the Qu’Appelle Valley Artists Guild, pottery, leathercrafts, wood carvings, Indigenous beading, stained glass, jewellery, metalcrafts, garden art, beverages, sweets and savouries, and more.
The children’s area is always a popular spot, with arts, crafts, face painting, and a special musical performance.
Entertainers will be performing throughout the day on a stage in the far corner of The Fort, just behind the beer garden. Rowan Teasdale is first up on the list, followed by Jacquie and Micah Walbaum and Little Miss Higgins.
Woodcarver Son Ninh from Vietnam will have a booth to show off his carvings of moose and other animals. Ninh has been carving since he was a child and began carving moose before he even came to Canada.
“In Vietnam, there are some villages where everyone knows about woodcarving,” Ninh explained. “And I’m from a village like that, so I can do it as well. But I’m not specialized in that career. … Before I came to Canada, I saw that this area has a lot of moose, so I carved them. I express my feelings and thoughts about the people and the culture and nature in Canada through the moose.”
Ninh is currently studying welding at Sask Polytech in Regina and Moose Jaw and hopes to bring his family to live here when he obtains his certificate.
Brian Baggett is a veteran of the Mid-Summer’s Art Festival. He started performing there in 2010 while still in the process of immigrating from Texas. Baggett’s wife is from Saskatoon and had cousins in Fort Qu’Appelle.
“We decided to raise our kids up here in her home province, and I’m a musician, so before we even left the States, her cousin set up a gig for me and I performed at it in 2010,” Baggett said. “I play a 10-string instrument called the Chapman stick. And I play solo and improvisational music, mostly jazz. Original and cover tunes, but I’ve also played in bands.”
He’s played every year since. However, this year, for the first time, Baggett will be selling his woodcarving art instead. He began carving in 2016 — at the festival. It was a friendly and inviting place to start a hobby, he said, and it has a good friendly vibe with lots to do.
It takes nearly 100 volunteers to make the event possible, Bedel said, and she sent a special thanks to them. She said the sponsors, the town of Fort Qu’Appelle, and the RM of North Qu’Appelle are also generous supporters of the festival.
“I always like to promote our town, too,” Bedel said. “Besides the beach and the splash park, we have the museum and the beautiful Treaty 4 Governance Centre, we have tree carvings around town and we’re really close to the golf course.”
