For the complete photo gallery of this years ArtBeat! festival, click here.

by Neil W. McCabe

Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone and the Somerville Arts Council July 15-17 presented ArtBeat!, the city’s giant street festival in Davis Square.

“We were so worried about the weather, but I thought it went very well. We’ve gotten such positive feedback so far, and the crowd Friday night was the biggest we’ve ever had,” said Rachel Strutt, the arts council’s program director.

Strutt said she and Gregory Jenkins, the arts council’s executive director, started working on the festival in February. “Every year, it is a miracle that it all comes together. We have a small staff and no money. But it does, because we have awesome volunteers, a hard-working board and three great interns.”

“Mayor Curtatone and his office were wonderful. He agreed to sit in the dunking tank and was on stage with Greg when we opened the show in Seven Hills Park,” she said.

“Friday night, the mayor wasn’t scheduled to speak, but he just showed up and he was so excited that the place was so packed. It shows he is open to people and he takes pleasure and pride in Somerville,” she said.

This year’s theme was key to the festival’s success, she said. “Greg came up with the theme of play, which was so inclusive and could be
interpreted different ways.”

“The Boylston Chess Club set up chess games in the statue park and another group dressed up like football referees and played poker in the traffic island,” she said. “Somebody actually walked up to them and joined them.”

This year there were 70 booths, 20 more than last year, chosen from more than 100 applications, she said. “It gets so crazy because we try to accommodate everyone, but too many people waited until the last minute.”

“Saturday morning when Greg and I were marking off the plots for the different booths, we realized that we didn’t have enough tables,” she said.

Strutt said it all worked out, but it took everyone working together.

One example was that the Boylston Chess Club let the Somerville Museum use one of their tables.

Another challenge was the return of the dunking tank after many years, she said. When the fire department first filled the tank, there was so much copper in the water that it looked like a giant cup of coffee. Strutt was able to find a DPW worker who called the fire department to re-fill the dunking tank with clean water.

Once the tank was filled there was nobody designated to supervise it during the day, she said. Strutt asked the volunteers, who did not have a set assignment to go over to the dunking tank and see what they could do. “I walked by around one o’clock, and magically it was up and running. There was a guy with an ArtBeat! shirt and there was a line of people. That really shows the great volunteering spirit we have every year.”

Strutt said one of the ways, participants supported the festival was buying tee-shirts and commemorative ArtBeat! dog tags, which are three dollars each. “We sold out of all of 2,000 dog tags and we have maybe a couple tee-shirts left.”

“We even set-up a compliment booth with the slogan, ‘Pay us to pay you a compliment,” she said.

“We really made a decision to more aggressively sell the dog tags,” she said. A volunteer, Stanley M. Czesnick Jr., led the dog tag effort, by organizing and motivating the volunteers. Czesnick and his team designed hip and mod trays held up by over the neck straps.

Strutt said she did not have a firm idea how much money ArtBeat! took in, or if it broke even. “This week the job is to figure it all out. All we can hope to do is to break even after we pay for the talent, printers and
things like tee-shirts.