Visit the Snake Alley Art Fair, Sunday, June 21, 2009, Burlington, Iowa

The Snake Alley Art Fair is a daylong celebration of creativity and community, centering on a love for the visual arts. Growing from a start back in 1968 as a small gathering of local artists who set up for the day along Snake Alley — the crookedest street in the world! — the fair is now an annual event with an attendance of thousands.

SAAF 2009, set to run from 8:00 in the morning until 4:00 in the afternoon, encompasses much to see and buy from one hundred fine artists and craftspeople, plus musicians playing under the trees — and a juggler! — and art-making activities for children. The fair hap­­pens along Snake Alley and residential streets just north of the alley, in Burlington’s Heritage Hill Historic District. There is no admission charge.

The Snake Alley Art Fair is organized and staffed almost wholly by volunteers from the community, many of whom have dedicated hundreds of hours to the enterprise over the decades of its existence. SAAF is a program of the Art Guild of Burlington, a community-based arts center currently located in the historic Arts for Living Center at 620 Washington Street in downtown Burlington
.
RAIN OR SHINE, THE FAIR GOES ON! In case of truly inclement weather, the Snake Alley Art Fair moves to its alternate site, the Des Moines County Fairgrounds at Southeastern Community College’s West Burlington campus, approximately 3.5 miles west of Snake Alley.

See the Artist Map below...

Snake Alley
Art Show Artist's
Information

Visit the Gallery in June for...

Judith Eastburn: Landscape Photographs

This exhibition of black-and-white photos by Judith Eastburn will be the last regular exhibition at the Arts for Living Center prior to the Art Guild’s move to 301 Jefferson Street.
The exhibition continues through June 27. The gallery will be open on the day of the Snake Alley Art Fair — Sunday, June 21 — from 10:00 am until 4:00 pm.

The natural beauty captured in Judith Eastburn’s landscape photography will seem familiar to southeast Iowans. That’s because Eastburn was strongly influenced by the Iowa landscape as she grew up in Burlington and graduated from Burlington High School in 1962. She remembers the way the land would flatten, then rise when she would travel as a child with her parents, Eleanor and Harvey Eastburn, to Oskaloosa to visit her grandparents.

“It can be a boring drive, the unrelenting farm land,” she remembers. “You do start to look for what’s unusual and what stands out.”
Eastburn learned this well. What stands out in her black-and-white images are the evocative details — the sweep of a tree that resembles a human gesture, the line of a rickety barbed-wire fence that draws the eye to a horizon jammed with dramatic clouds. She focuses on the tantalizing tidbit in a stretch of land that some might find uninteresting.
Choosing what to shoot is “a gut kind of thing,” says Eastburn, "seeing how you can take an expanse of the real world and separate it into something that stands alone.”

Eastburn recently retired as an art teacher at Dowling High School in Des Moines, while she continues to teach evening classes at Grandview University there. She now has more time to take pictures and to visit her mom in Burlington — her father passed away last June.

Harvey Eastburn kindled his daughter’s interest in photography, giving her a camera when she was small and encouraging her to snap away wherever she went. “He just loved to travel and take pictures,” she says. The works in the Art Guild exhibition are, in a way, a travelogue, a record of where Judith Eastburn has been, with scenes of nature from all over Iowa and the Midwest, as well as from Eastburn’s travels in England and Sweden. But more importantly, the works are a record of what her photographer’s eye has seen.