Art and Music return to Hooper Park

The Annual Lincoln Art & Music Festival at Hooper Park held Aug 13 and 14 was scaled down a bit this year, with about 20 vendors and three bands on hand for the two-day event.

Finding both vendors and bands proved to be a challenge this year, and while the weekend proved to be generally successful, festival organizer Karyn Good said it was a tricky thing to pull together.

“It’s getting harder and harder to find artists who will do outdoor events, especially fine artists,” she said. “When we started this, that’s really what we were going for…but it’s tough to get them to do outdoor events, and I think it’s tough for them to sell those big-ticket items.”

When Art in the Park returned in 2015, the original plan for bringing it back was to focus on attracting more fine artists. Two years later it was rebranded as the Lincoln Art and Music Festival, featuring high quality artwork and crafts, two days of musical performances and Lincoln’s first Continental Divide Trail Gateway Community celebration.

Good said some of the artists who usually take part are also getting older and just aren’t up to it. And COVID still plays a role. Like so many events in 2020, the pandemic meant canceling the festival that year, but it returned in 2021. While most restrictions may be thing of the past this year, the far less deadly but much more communicable variants of the disease still had an impact. “I’ve had several of them cancel because of that,” Good said. “That just leaves a lot of things up in the air, when you can’t plan things because of COVID.”

Good said she hopes to see more vendors at next year's festival. Although it has drawn up to 45 vendors before, she thinks the “sweet spot” for the event is somewhere between 25 and 30 vendors.

Vendors weren’t the only thing in short supply this year.

“I had such a struggle this year finding music,” Good said. “All of my regulars were booked and were like, ‘I’ve been booked for a year.’ I just struggled to find music, but luckily, we did. We got enough music lined up, and it’s good, quality music.”

Bands this year included the State Champions, a trio out of Helena; Pollo Loco, the classic cowboy band from Great Falls, and Jarred Hanson & The SunsAh406, a band from Helena singing original songs in “true Montana Americana style.”

Unlike past years, the festival didn’t include music on Sunday, which often featured smaller bands or local performers.

The paucity of bands also played a role in the cancellation of the annual Lincoln Council for the Arts Barn Dance. Normally held on the Friday evening before the festival, it was canceled when dance organizer Sue Murphy couldn’t find a band.

She pointed out that with COVID many bands have not been working, and those that have stuck it out were booked all the way through September. “That was the only issue,” she said.

“We didn’t want to do a Barn Dance with a DJ,” her husband Rick Foreman said.

With enough lead time to book a band, the Barn Dance should be back next year.

Aside from art and music, the festival wast a chance for people to learn more about the Continental Divide Trail and the Lincoln Prosperity Proposal.

In 2017 efforts by the Lincoln Valley Chamber of Commerce led Lincoln to be recognized by the Continental Divide Trail Coalition as Montana’s first CDT Gateway Community. Since then, the CDT Coalition has been a fixture at the festival, part of the annual CDT Gateway Community celebration.

Likewise, the Lincoln Prosperity Group was on hand to provide information about the Lincoln Prosperity Proposal. The LPP is a community-led effort that seeks to create a legislative package for land management in the Lincoln area. The plan would open up more area to motorized and bicycle recreation, maintain access to popular snowmobiling areas, institute some much needed forest restoration projects while also seeing some areas designated as wilderness, notably Nevada Mountain, which is already designated as an Inventoried Roadless Area.

The LPP hosted a kids coloring contest again this year. Kids could choose between a horse or dinosaur illustration to work on. This year’s winners were Emma Dey and Marabel Severson, who both won in the 3 to 6-year-old category; Cooper Clark among the 7 to 12-year-olds; and Jessica Zarske in the 13 to 18-year-old category.