In addition to Super Bulldog Weekend events and the Old Main Music Festival Saturday, the Starkville community will also be able to take part in this year’s Cotton District Arts Festival.
Emilie Cravens, public relations chair for the festival, said the free festival offers a little bit everything for attendees.
“If there’s something you like, you will find it at the arts festival, no doubt,” she said. “For a college student, where else can you see 17 bands and walk around for free and just have a great day.”
Cravens said the festival, which was attended by over 30,000 people last year, is continuing to expand.
“We have more vendors than ever; I think we’re up to 113. I believe that is about 15 more than last year, and this year, the festival is just expanding in general,” she said.
The festival will offer areas including a writing village and a Celtic village. Booths will feature painters, potters, sculptors and many others’ work. Cravens said part of the festival’s success can be attributed to the high standard festival organizers have for participating artists.
“You cannot sell anything that you did not hand make; you can’t sell any kits or things that you bought and are re-selling,” she said. “Everything has to have a handmade feel to it. We really get great art to be sold.”
Senior art major Kate Thomas and three other students joined together to open a booth at the festival. She said she is looking forward to taking part in the event.
“I’m excited. It’s four of us that have a booth. We went in together and every year we said we want to do it,” she said. “We all have a little bit different work but we thought we’d just give it a try.”
Thomas said in the past, some of the art she saw has beenstereotypical, but she hopes her group’s art including posters, letterpress works, drawings and other crafts will bring something different to the event.
“Usually, the work [has been] cookie-cutter,” Thomas said. “We wanted to bring something different but still make it affordable.”
The festival will also feature multiple musical acts beginning at 9:30 a.m. and continuing throughout the event.
“The music, [the organizers have] those stages just chocked full of absolutely everything, the local stage that’s sponsored by Metrocast has lots of local things like the new MSU show choir. I’m really excited for those guys,” she said.
Sophomore biochemistry and communication major Blake Garrett, the president and one of the founders of the show choir said the group jumped on the opportunity to perform.
He said the group has been steadily preparing for Saturday’s show, and as Blitz!’s final performance of the spring, he said he hopes it will cap-off the semester.
“We’ve been rehearsing for a while since our first performance,” he said. “We have the stage from 1:30 to 2:45 p.m.; we’re really excited because we’ve been doing a lot this semester.”
The event will also feature a large and diverse selection of Starkville food.
She said the festival garnered the festival several awards, but organizers are hoping to continue the festival’s success and garner national attention.
“We’ve just worked really hard to set a standard for what an arts festival should be by being very selective about our vendors, really promoting the arts,” she said.
She said the Starkville Area Arts Council who puts on the event has been working with the university to coordinate the day’s festival with other the other events going on in the area.
“It’s a great partnership, and they’ve been very easy to work with, and I think it’s probably harder for the public to decide what they’re going to do; to make their schedule for the day,” Cravens said. “The university has helped out quite a bit.”
Cravens said in a joint effort with the university, buses will run from the morning until 8 p.m. that night in an effort to allow visitors to enjoy all of the weekend events.
“If you want to see a baseball game, but you want to catch a band, you can hop on a shuttle, and those are going to be running even beyond the festival until it’s 8 p.m. at night,” she said.