The last chance to see a Howard Alan Art Festival is coming Aug. 19-20 during the second annual “Flats Festival of the Arts,” where local and national artists can show off their work next to the Flats East Bank waterfront.
“Cleveland has never really hosted one of the very large art festivals and that’s what we envision growing this into,” said Scott Wolstein, the CEO of Starwood Retail Partners and managing partner at the Wolstein Group, which developed the Flats East Bank along with Fairmount Properties.
This is the second year Flats East Bank hosted an art show, but the first time it is partnering with Howard Alan Art Festival, which allows the art show to be free to the public. The Flats also partnered with Downtown Cleveland Alliance’s SPARX City Hop, allowing visitors to hop on and off a trolley to see all of Cleveland’s districts in the same day.
“We got off to a great start last year, we had over 10,000 people come down on an event that had an admission charge,” Wolstein said. “We want the Flats to be for everybody. It’s obviously become quite popular for millennials, but we really want it to be an area that is welcoming to all ages and generations.”
The Flats is the fourth Howard Alan Art Festival to come to the Cleveland area this year. Others were at Legacy Village in Lyndhurst, Hathaway Brown in Shaker Heights and Crocker Park in Westlake.
“The first two shows were phenomenal,” said Howard Alan, president of Howard Alan Events, referring to the shows at Legacy Village and Crocker Park. “The show that didn’t work was Hathaway Brown. What happened was, first of all, it was Father’s Day weekend and secondly, the other shows are in wonderful commercial areas. (Hathaway Brown) is in the middle of a residential area.”
Alan said Hathaway Brown would need years to build its reputation and he doesn’t plan to return to the location for future shows.
A portion of proceeds from the final show will support the Cleveland School of the Arts, an arts school in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, and H.E.L.P., a nonprofit organization devoted to helping children in Malawi in southeastern Africa.
The Cleveland Jewish News and Canvas magazine are media sponsors of the Flats Festival of the Arts.
