GUILD NEWS | BY DR. BEVERLY MCMURTRY GRISSOM, MOAS GUILD PRESIDENT
Good Things Come in Threes
William Kidd being presented with the award for Best in Show by Cheryl Cook at the 2018 Halifax Art Festival.
The Best in Show winning piece by William Kidd. Show by Cheryl Cook at the 2018 Halifax Art Festival.
Signature Events Close Out the 2018 Year for the MOAS Guild
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onths and months of intense planning and organizing on the part of the Guild’s amazing, dedicated volunteers have culminated in another successful, gratifying, productive, and exhausting fall season of signature events: THREE of them! On October 26, Mike Armstrong and his team of loyal volunteers held our annual Children’s Museum Golf Classic at Plantation Bay. You will recall that this tournament was originally scheduled to be held in April, but intensive rains caused the postponement of the event. The rescheduled event was again rained out. (I am beginning to think that Mother Nature is NOT a golf fan!) All was not lost, however. While no golf was played, through the generosity of Club De Bonmont at Plantation Bay, each player was given a voucher for a free round of golf. Not one of the golfers asked the Guild for a refund of their entry fees. Most of them stayed for the other attendant activities—lunch, silent auction, etc. The only difference in the revenue generated was not earning the money for the sale of Mulligans to the players. A huge thanks is due to our volunteers, the golfers, our sponsors, patrons, and the golf club.
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The purchase award for the 2018 Halifax Art Festival went to Jeff Thamert, an award-winning Fine Art Landscape Photographer based out of Florida.
The very next weekend, many of those same tournament volunteers worked tirelessly for three days through set up, the two-day event itself, cleanup, and documentation wrap-up for our nationally celebrated Halifax Art Festival. The volunteers arrived at the crack of dawn each day. Pam Fieldus, who coordinated all contact with the artists, was on Beach Street at 5 am Saturday morning to check in artists who had not checked on Friday. Speaking of Friday, a serious storm with destructive high winds roared through Beach Street and severely damaged seven booths the artists had just finished setting up, and an additional 21 booths sustained varying degrees of damage. A rough start to be sure, but Saturday was a beautiful day with impressive crowds. Another rain shower on Sunday morning passed through, but afterwards the crowds of people came to see the wonderful art displays. From the looks of the packages being toted,
plenty of art was purchased. We had 265 artists. 170 of those were competitive fine artists. and 80 were non-competitive. 37 were from out of state, representing 20 different states, the farthest being California. We even had one artist here from Estonia. We had 71 new exhibitors this year. The Little Van Gogh tent, where children could create a painting, was a popular attraction each day. It was a joy to watch their approach to selfexpression through art. The NewsJournal Center housed the K-12 Student Art Show. The artwork on display there was diverse, impressive, and beautiful. A new feature this year was our partnership with the VA and the Veteran’s Art Coalition to also showcase their work. The artist surveys received so far repeatedly praised the quality of the show and our level of organization. The winner of Best in Show was a clay art piece created by William Kidd of Miami, Florida. He works