Fairfield First Fridays features online caroling

By Andy Hallman

Fairfield First Fridays will host its December Art Walk at 6 p.m. Friday featuring online holiday caroling from a host of singers and musicians.

Due to the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, Fairfield First Fridays decided the safest thing for the community was to hold its Art Walk online. There will be local (and not so local) performers sharing their talents with holiday music. Live videos will be posted on the Fairfield First Fridays Art Walk Facebook page, and the Fairfield First Fridays website (fairfieldfirstfridays.org).

The performers and the times of their performance are:

6 p.m. Amber | The Crescent Cardinal

6:20 p.m. Sharon Bousquet

6:40 p.m. Philadelphia Phil

7 p.m. Pierce Crask

7:20 p.m. Frank Cenatori

7:40 p.m. Deonna Troxel

8 p.m. Hillbilly Jake

8:20 p.m. Michael Jones

8:40 p.m. Thad Foster

For more information, call Fairfield First Fridays Executive Director Marla Brader at 641-233-8883, or email fairfieldartwalk@gmail.com.

Brader said every art walk since April has been online, and she's eager to return to in-person events. At the same time, she and the art walk board have to do what's in the community's best interest, and that has meant holding art walks in a strictly virtual format for most of the year.

'I get a lot of complaints from people who are mad we moved these events online, but we have to do our part to keep everybody safe,” Brader said. 'We miss doing these events in-person. I'd be surprised if anyone misses the in-person events as much as I do.”

Brader said art walks are usually planned a year in advance. This year, each monthly art walk has been planned three times: the original event, an online-only version, and alternate in-person version modified to comply with COVID guidelines. Unfortunately, that last option has never been put into practice because COVID cases have not gone away.

'It never occurred to me that eight months later we'd be worse off than we were in March or April,” Brader said.

Nevertheless, Brader said art walk is getting good participation for its online events. The numbers aren't quite what they are for in-person events, but they still show there is a high demand for art of all kinds in Fairfield. For instance, the gallery hop in November 2019 had between 500-700 people, and of those 200-300 participated in the passport event where people could win a prize if they visited all of the galleries in town. For this past November, art walk held its gallery hop virtually, so members of the public could see the artwork online. The Carnegie Historical Museum offered a 3-D tour of the museum.

'It was fabulous,” Brader said of the museum's 3-D tour.

Brader said the participating online galleries got between 70-180 views each. One nice thing about art walk's virtual events is that they are recorded and can be played later. In fact, art walk leaves those performances up on its Facebook page, so people can watch events that happened last spring.

Art walk will take a break in January and return in February with an open mic night. If COVID is still a problem by then, art walk plans to hold the open mic online.