Green Artists Rally for EcoArts Festival

By her third day on the job, Jane Lipton was thinking that Manayunk needed a fall festival.

As Manayunk Development Corporation's executive director and an environmentalist at heart, Lipton then helped champion the small green festival Home Grown. A year later, that event has evolved into this weekend's EcoArts Festival, a two-day event featuring over 120 sustainable artists, vendors and nonprofits who have received both local and national acclaim.

"Mayor Nutter has been very open about his wished to make Philadelphia the greenest city in the country," Lipton said. "I want to Manayunk the greenest district in the greenest city in the country."

A few thousand people came out to Grape and Cotton Streets last year for Home Grown, but with this year's two-day festival, featured right on Main Street, Lipton anticipates some 25,000 visitors to the weekend's assorted events.

"We certainly know how to throw a festival," Lipton said, referencing Manayunk's annual June Arts Festival. Manayunk is not reinventing the wheel with EcoArts, she said. Rather, the district is using its previous success to create a new, greener avenue for visitors.

"It's been really wonderful to see my district move in this direction," Lipton said, noting that the development corporation's new Main Street office has even gotten greener since the outset of the festival.

The festival will display work from dozens of artists, many of whom have been touted in a rotating catalog on the festival's website. Artists include Kathleen Plate and her Smart Glass Jewelry—which takes recyclable glass bottles and creates assorted pieces of jewelry—and Kimberlie Moy's Golden Plum Designs, which creates jewelry made with recycled tin.

Leah McDonald's Wax Works Photos use found and recycled materials to create lasting art, while Pedro Ospina creates handcrafted birdcages from recyclables, and Stewart and Susan Webb of Artco make art with used technology pieces.

Through Destination Schuylkill River, five nationally acclaimed eco-artists will paint environmentally conscious works that will be featured along the Manayunk Towpath.

The EcoArts festival is a growing exhibition, featuring everything from the Philadelphia Zoo's "Zoo on Wheels" to the demonstration of the Hydra, a solar-powered machine that will suction water from the Schuylkill River or the Manayunk Canal and filter it to become clean drinking water, which will equate to about 20,000 gallons of clean water a day.

In addition, the festival's car show will showcase seven cars that can drive over 28 mpg for those interested in taking a test drive, as well as local company Hammerhead's Volta, an electric motorcycle.

West Philadelphia High School will also be bringing its X Prize piece, an alternative energy vehicle that can get 100 mpg, to Manayunk for the weekend. Friends of Manayunk Canal have crated 50 rain barrels, some of which have already been painted, that will debut at tonight's launch party leading into the festivities.

During the two-day event the Manayunk Development Corporation will hand out four awards to "Eco Champions" such as Phillies pitcher Ryan Madson and Nutter, who have used their high-profile positions to strive for sustainability practices.

"We're really, really excited for these events," Lipton said. "We're hoping people come down and have a great time and maybe learn something," she said.

To learn more about EcoArts Festival, visit the event website.