Corn Hill Trip Report

This past Sunday I went to the Corn Hill Arts Festival in Rochester, NY. For those not in the know it is an annual summer arts festival held in the historic Corn Hill neighborhood in the heart of the city, which means artists come to hawk their wares in the summer heat for a weekend.

This year I noticed they had less vendors, but higher quality goods. Many of the obviously Chinese made and commercial product resellers weren't there this year, and the obligatory Comfort Windows/Bath Fitter/other home improvement businesses were confined to the area around the gazebo, along with most of the food vendors. It's a good thing that the festival appears to finally be weeding out the lesser merchandise, even if it does raise the average price of goods.

Since pictures are largely frowned upon (some artists even have no photographs please signs on their booths) I'll have to make due with the websites and images within of a few artists.

I got this pitcher in red from ceramicist Allan Ditton, who was quite happy that another artist was buying it and had some interesting advice basically amounting to having a fallback option like teaching. There is more of his work for sale here, if anyone is interested.

Now each year the festival has a section for emerging artists, which according to their website is for artists aged 15 to 25 who have never been in a juried art show before. I like to go through this often small and deserted section to see if there is any great hidden talent. This year there was glass artist Nick Cohn, who had these beautiful small vases, all of them were perfectly proportioned, no lopsidedness or anything. As you can tell I like the black and white marbled ones the best and may yet buy one from his Etsy shop.

Out of all the jewelers at Corn Hill this year I was suprised to find only one person, Heidi Kester of Woodland Wisp Jewelry Creations, who uses Precious Metal Clay to make pieces. As much as I hate working with clay, there are some advantages with its flexibility and I have been curious to try the sort of witchcraft that clay, once fired in a small kiln, becomes metal.

As you can see I've saved the best for last, the amazing designs of Trisko Jewelry Sculptures, by Robert and Helen Trisko. Naturally they had much much more at the festival all if it very architectural jewelry and all of it gold. This is actually the second time I've seen a jeweler with thousand dollar price tags at a festival and the only reason I can think of for them being at a craft show is purely for advertising's sake, especially when we're discussing solid 14 and 18k gold pieces that go up to 10,000 dollars, literally.

Overall it was a really good Corn Hill and much better than in years past. For the record this year's must have item was iron dragonfly lawn ornaments that had been welded together, and quite bargain priced. Also no one can come up with anything creative to do with beach glass outside of drilling it, wire wrapping it, and bezel setting it. With this distraction over, it time to get back to work on my own stuff, and perhaps, finish something.