Plein Air Festival opens national event in Niwot for the first time after pandemic

The Boulder County Plein Air Festival, hosted by Open Studios, begins this week at the former feed store in Niwot and will run through July 5.

Seventy artists submitted portfolios this year on a national level. This is reported to be one of the largest Plein Air Festivals in the country, with the largest award packet offered by the festival, according to Mary Horrocks, the Executive Director of Open Studios.

This will be the first national plein air contest since the COVID pandemic. The competition, which started in 2017, stopped in 2020 due to the pandemic, and every competition since has been only open to Boulder County locals. While most of the artists entered are from the Boulder County area, there are several national and international artists on display this year.

The jurors who selected artists this year are Jen Russell, from Creative Framing in Louisville, Mary Williams, who runs the Mary Williams Fine Art Gallery in Boulder, and Anne Kullaf, a professional artist who was a previous Plein Air artist and has artwork in galleries throughout the country.

This year’s selected artists include Gretchen Acharya, Linda Bice, Suzanne Burnell, Andrew Busch, Sue Cable, Rebecca Caridad, Karen Conduff, Peg Connery-Boyd, Marcio Correa, Katie Curcio, Gail Denton, Jason Emery, Bill Enyart, Jane Evans, Linda Sole Faul, Laurence Granston, Steve Briggs, Steven Homsher, Buffalo Kaplinski, Jody Kauflin, Gail Kelly, Kay Keyes Farrar, Jan Kirkpatrick, David Knox, Kathleen Lanzoni, Whitman Lindstrom, Jonathan Machen, Elizabeth Menand, George Sanderson, Connie Schmidt, John Sliviak, Scott Snarr, Christine Springer, Lindsay Jane Ternes, Jan Vander Linden, Alex Wicks, Chris Willey, Scott Willhite, Lauren Williamson, and William Yu.

Artists will be judging each other for the final prizes in a group. According to the event organizers, the peer review helps give the judging a more objective consideration of the individual pieces by other artists who understand the methods behind the piece.

“I think as plein air artists, this actually levels the playing field,” said Lindsay Jane Ternes, a local artist and one of the chairs of the festival’s steering committee, in the Plein Air Festival’s 2024 press release. “It’s not just one juror’s opinion of the art, but the consensus of everybody who’s participated and has viewed area landscapes all week. It’s going to be really fun to see how that turns out.”

The canvases are stamped with a special stamp, then the artists are sent to paint. The artists travel to various different places over the week and can paint any outdoor location that they wish within Boulder County. There will be painting meets for the artists at Niwot, Chautauqua, Jamestown, and many more locations. Prizes will be based around the meets for each specific day and historic places in Boulder County. All 40 artists are given a week, from June 1st to 7th, to paint before turning in their work to the exhibition, which will be open to view the next day at the former feed store in Niwot at 291 2nd Avenue.

There are several events occurring after the first week of the challenge. June 8 is the first day the exhibitions will open for viewing, and from 5-6 p.m. is a ticketed VIP event for patrons to be the first to view the paintings before the Opening Reception and Awards Presentation, which is open to the public from 6-9 p.m.

After the opening reception, the exhibit will be open from noon to 5 p.m. on Thursdays through Sundays until the exhibit closes after Friday, July 5. During the Niwot Cultural Arts Association’s First Friday Art Walk on July 5, the exhibit will be open until 9 p.m. instead of the normal hours. July 5 will be the last day for the exhibit.

“We really like being able to highlight one of the historic parts of Boulder County and Niwot’s downtown area has lovely historic buildings, and Niwot’s community has been very supportive of our organization,” Horrocks said regarding the Plein Air Festival’s Niwot location. “Our organization works to shine a light on the arts throughout Boulder County, and ever since the feed … store building was sold and the current owner converted it into a gallery, it’s been a wonderful place to hold exhibits, so we decided we would make the festival headquarters in Niwot, encourage the artists to paint images of the historic buildings in Niwot and hold the exhibits there.”