Southern Indiana Living Magazine - Sept / Oct 2023

Southern Indiana Festivals
The Fourth Street Festival of Arts and Crafts
Beauty and artisanship at the 47th annual event in Bloomington, Indiana
Story and Photos by Sheryl Woodhouse
The 47th annual Fourth Street
Art Festival will return to
Bloomington on Labor Day
weekend, Sept. 2-3, from
10 a.m.-6 p.m. on Saturday and 10
a.m. -5 p.m. on Sunday. The iconic
event is one of most beloved events
on Bloomington’s art and culture
calendar. Typically, at least a third
of the juried artists are displaying
their work at Fourth Street for the
first time. This allows the attendees
to connect with their favorite artists
and to discover new work and meet
the people who create it. This year
is no different.
Four of this year’s new artists,
from various Indiana communities,
are painter Taylor Walker of Carmel,
potter Kelly Meska of Bloomington,
jeweler Heidi Mandich of
Indianapolis, and wood turner
Samuel Dean of Whitehall. While
each artist has their own genre and
techniques, they all share a passion
for creating art and making things,
a love for detail and teaching, and
all are committed to experimenting,
continually learning and perfecting
their art, and are well-tuned into
22 • Sept/Oct 2023 • Southern Indiana Living
the business aspects of making a
living with their art.
Walker is an expressionist
painter who is passionate about
animals and focuses on them in her
work. Her goal is to blend technical
ability and photo realism with
exaggerated rainbow color and
strokes to create emotion. She says,
“Neutrals don’t register in my
brain. Purple is my black. Green is
my neutral. I want my work to be
colorful, but not childish; I make it
OK to be colorful as an adult.” As a
young artist, she just started doing
art shows last year, meeting other
artists and joining the volunteer art
show committees.
Meska has been a potter for 25
years and has also been an art teacher
most of that time. Since moving
to Bloomington three years ago, she
devotes her time exclusively to creating
functional ceramics with nontraditional
looks and uses. Meska
uses a mix of throwing, altering and
hand-building in her pottery, and
cuts original, mostly nature-based
designs into linoleum that she imprints
into the clay of her hand-built
work. She takes pride in being very
picky about the design of her mugs,
getting the weight, size and feel just
right, as well as adding details that
make them more unique. She loves
doing shows, where customers can
pick up each mug and find one that
feels right to them, while hearing
about her involved, multi-step process,
which usually surprises them.
“I was not an artist or a teacher
by trade,” says Mandich. “I took my
first metalsmithing class at the Indianapolis
Art Center in 2006 and did
my first show a year later.” Soon,
she was teaching metalsmithing at
the art center, and realized that she
loved both, which helped spur her
into early retirement after an advertising
and sales career. Mandich’s
two unusual techniques are quilling
with metal and torch-painting
titanium. As a poor conductor of
heat, titanium makes a satisfying
medium for painting, so that you
can lay one color down next to another
without changing the first
one. “You’re still not in charge of
the color,” she says. Admiring paper
quilling, Mandich wondered,