BPSW's Festival in the Wild highlights music, continued community support

Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild welcomed fall with Festival in the Wild 2018, a weekend program of events and music celebrating the sculpture park's fifth anniversary.

The festival kicked off with a sold-out café music night and fundraiser art auction at the Lincoln Community Hall. The event featured refreshments in a candlelit café style ambiance accompanied by live music from performing artists Phil Aaberg, Pan Morigan, Marvin Suson, Aoise O'Dwyer and BPSW Composer in Residence Adele O'Dwyer, as well as a live art auction to benefit BPSW's arts and education program.

"I'm experiencing fine dining in a rustic setting," BPSW President Becky Garland said during her opening remarks Saturday night. "I think we can dial 1-800-great food."

BPSW Artistic Director Kevin O'Dwyer followed Garland's introduction with a slide show and a look at the park's progress in five years.

"We have a 26-acre Sculpture Park that has been celebrating the environmental and industrial history by bringing in artists that engage with that storytelling. Sculptors are storytellers no [less] than painters, and the ones that I have brought in have done a lot of research, and they actually tell their story through their artwork. It may be very abstract, but there is a story behind it," O'Dwyer said. "We have fifteen large-scale sculptures at this stage, from six countries. Our education program has reached over twelve-hundred children over the five years. It's free to the public."

O'Dwyer also noted that the latest numbers from the electronic visitor counter shows that more than 30,000 people have visited Sculpture in the Wild so far this year.

Other accomplishments he touched on included wheelchair accessible toilets and walkways, orientation and information signs, and cooperation with the University of Montana to bring emerging artists into the equation, as well as community outreach, music, lectures and hands-on activities.

"As I've said before, it takes a community, and this community has rallied around...in so many ways with so much support that we've been able to and make this our fifth anniversary," he said. "I appreciate every one of you for all that you've done over the years. It's a wonderful experience for me as well as, I hope, for everybody else that actually goes out into the sculpture park."

The evening also marked the debut of the Dunkerley-O'Dwyer Award, designed to recognize people who have gone above and beyond in their support for Sculpture in the Wild. In a surprise presentation, longstanding BPSW board member Paul Roos presented the first two awards to O'Dwyer and BPSW co-founder Rick Dunkerley

According to Garland, the fundraiser event was an un-equivocated success.

"We were sold out by the end of June," Garland said of the evening. "Through sending cards out, through social media, through board members just chatting it up, it was the easiest sell-out ever. The BVD ran our ad for two months, and a lot of it came from that, too. We didn't have to beg anybody- we actually had to turn people away, these last couple of weeks."

"That was a smash hit of an event. Really the best benefit dinner event I have ever been to, and I've been to a lot! So many special details like the appreciation tags attached to the bag that my auction item was in! The music was of course incredible. My car load talked of little else all the way home," one anonymous attendee gushed in a congratulatory e-mail to BPSW board members.

The festivities continued Sunday, with a free afternoon concert featuring singer/songwriter Pan Morrigan and friends.

The series of afternoon concerts, celebrating both the Park and the Hall's centennial celebration, were planned to appeal in particular to Lincoln's senior residents and have been consistently well-attended, Garland said Monday.

"With all of our lunchtime concerts and yesterday's concert we've always had between 50 and 100 people," she said. "The lunchtime concert this Wednesday at 12:30 will really be a showstopper."

"It's all hits from the 30's, 40's and 50's," O'Dwyer added. "old standby's – something they might have danced to in the Community Hall."

Garland said BPSW coordinators plan to revisit Festival in the Wild in 2019.

"We're going to make it an annual event, and it will probably always be a café music night," she said. "We probably won't always have the composer-in-residence program, but ... we do always want to have music."

She said BPSW is also close to having the funds to purchase a grand piano for the community.

"We will have a grand piano at our fingertips to be able to use for the community and for our fundraisers, if we need," she said. ON Tuesday, they had raised all but $500 for the purchase.

Over the past two weeks, visitors from twelve states and six countries have visited Sculpture in the Wild.

"We probably had four to five hundred people through the park this weekend, and we had board members and volunteers out doing surveys that the department of tourism helped developed for us," Garland said.

A lifelong resident of Lincoln, Garland said for her the greatest thing about five years of Sculpture in the Wild has been the connections it has forged.

"It has brought people together," she said. "I'm seeing more people all of the time and hearing great comments about the park and the events that we have. Lots of people are enjoying them and enjoying being a part of it."

"There's a lot to do in Lincoln and this is just another addition to what there is to do in Lincoln, but it does make people want to come here and go out there. It certainly is a destination point for many, many people, whether it's locals or people coming in...it's a great place to go."

A Lincoln School Youth Concert performed by the school band is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 27 in the school gym. The program will include work prepared as part of the Sculpture in the Wild Montana-Ireland Song Exchange and Collaborative Composition projects, and will also offer an opportunity to view student artwork and writing inspired by the project.

The closing concert for the 2018 Sculpture in the Wild Residency is slated for 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 28, at the Community Hall. Free to the public, the specially commissioned musical composition by Composer in Residence Adele O'Dwyer will feature local and international musicians and performance artists and is not to be missed, according to Garland and Kevin O'Dwyer.

"There are people flying in from Seattle, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia..." said O'Dwyer. "It's going to be quite the night out, and there will be a couple of personalities there that you've seen on television."