Now in its 38th year, the Malibu Arts Festival is coming to the Civic Center in a blaze of glass, canvas, steel, pixels, weaves, color and light. More than 300 artist exhibitors will join 50 local merchants in what has become one of the premier outdoor art shows in the country.
“Of the exhibitors this year, about a quarter of them have been with this show for over 20 years,” Rebekah Evans of the Malibu Chamber of Commerce said. “For the rest, we started a ‘Zapplication,’ which is an online application for artists all across the country.”
Hopeful exhibitors wishing to show their work began submitting applications in January. A jury of five considered all the applications and whittled them down to just more than 300 artists, including seven-year-old Autumn de Forest, the festival’s featured artist this year.
De Forest is a resident of Las Vegas with Los Angeles roots. Her father Douglas de Forest is a California Institute of the Arts graduate and a Los Angeles producer/composer, and her mother Katherine is a Los Angeles film and television actress. They moved to Las Vegas in 2003, and while he worked on Vegas shows, Douglas watched with some surprise as his own artistic DNA blossomed in his daughter. “I would classify Autumn as abstract expressionist,” her father said. “People ask if she has taken classes or if I have instructed her but right now I say her work is coming from an innocent, unselfconscious place that she might never return to once age and a formal art education send her in other directions.”
Malibu will be Autumn’s third art show, and the first outside of Las Vegas. “She received an honorable mention at the first show and best in show at the second,” her proud father said. “These aren’t kid’s shows. She was the only kid there.”
Autumn de Forest might be the only preteenager presenting at the Malibu Arts Festival, but there will be facilities for young artists who want to express themselves. According to the official press release for the Malibu Arts Festival: “The children’s workshop is located in the ‘Sustainable Learning Area,’ where kids can create their own art with recycled items. They can learn ‘how to be green’ from local vendors, including Ford Motor Company, with fuel efficient cars.”
Along with more than 300 artists, the Malibu Arts Festival will also feature 50 area businesses, some of them in a special Wine Garden for wine tasting with music, and a wide variety of gourmet and fun foods.
Of artists who will be showing, Evans mentioned Nelson De La Nuez, a pop artist who uses American themes, from Dick Tracy to the Rolling Stones’ “Some Girl” album to President Obama, in his work. Michael Jackson was a fan and collector of De La Nuez until his recent death.
The works of Prescott Studios will also be present. From Santa Fe, New Mexico, Fred Prescott uses a welding torch and industrial tools to make larger than life animal sculptures, which he paints vividly and then installs in the backyards of private homes and at the front of businesses and institutions around the world.
The Malibu Arts Festival is drawing artists from around the country, including Clark Little, who is flying in from the North Shore of Oahu to display his “shore break art.” The brother of famous big wave surfer Brock Little, Clark Little began swimming around in dangerous shore breaks at Waimea Bay and Ke Iki, recording those “brief moments of bliss” he saw as a Hawaiian surfer, pulling into the tube. What began as a whim, Little said, “To get photos for the house because my wife was too cheap to go to Pictures Plus,” has morphed into a growing ocean art sensation. Little isn’t doing anything new. Surf photographers have been photographing waves from the inside out for decades, but there is something different about the photographs Little takes, and he has seen his hobby explode into a growing worldwide sensation.
The Malibu Arts Festival takes place 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday at Malibu Civic Center, 23555 Civic Center Way, between Cross Creek Road and Web Way off Pacific Coast Highway.
Ample parking is available for $7, across the street. More information can be obtained online at www.malibu.org or by calling 310.456.9025.