WHERE ART
MEETS THE MOUNTAINS
Sandra Cortner
THE CRESTED BUTTE ARTS FESTIVAL, FIVE DECADES AGO: A FREE-FORM FESTIVAL BORN IN A WILDER WEST. By Dawne Belloise
“I just left a place where nobody was running a race or rushing to find the finish line to some kind of end. Nobody was sad, no, everybody was so glad to be alive and in the company of lovers and friends. Crested Butte, honey, you sure can shoot. You took the gold and the loot. You got your feet on the ground. Crested Butte, honey, you sure are cute, and just like a worn-out boot, you’ve got me laying around...” – from the 1972 song “Crested Butte” by Brewer & Shipley
Crested Butte Arts Festival 1972. 26
It was a wilder West when the Crested Butte Arts Festival cranked up unpretentiously in the summer of 1971. Back then, the festival was a pleasant, sunny, dusty-day blur. Long-haired, smiling people strung beads into a lacy matrix of necklaces or hammered silver and copper wire into dangling earrings in a cloud of music, incense and other entrancing smoke. At those unstructured fairs on an unpaved Elk Avenue, the somewhat newly relocated hippie artists and musicians tuned in and turned on, sold their crafts and plied their music. Crested Butte’s coal mines had shut down by the 1950s, and the ski area that opened in 1962 began attracting a far different demographic from those who’d come to work below ground. First came the ski bums, then the artists – the musicians, actors, painters, dancers and dreamers. These free spirits saw both the beauty and the potential to live nonconforming lives in a tiny town in the back of beyond. (Crested Butte is still a haven for creatives, and their influence shows in everything from handpainted buses to crazy-good community dance shows.) The first Crested Butte Arts Festival was loosely manifested by three young men –
Michael Berry, Jim Cazer and George Sibley. “Michael had just purchased a semi load of railroad ties at an auction,” Sibley recalled. “He thought that an interesting thing to do would be to build a covered pavilion where we could have an arts festival to show off the art in the community. He wanted to do something that the community could get into.” So Berry set out to find Sibley, who was the editor and writer for the Crested Butte Chronicle newspaper, to promote the idea. It took about a week to build the pavilion – “this rambling, shaded but really nice, cool, lovely place that smelled of creosote but was a work of art itself,” Sibley said. The pavilion went up approximately where the Post Office parking lot is now. Susan Anderton, one of the original festival artists, remembered that free form was the norm. “It wasn’t like you had a formal committee that got together and decided to do something. It just happened; people just got together.” Anderton fondly sifted through her recollections of the era. “People were so supportive and enthusiastic. I had some of the best times. I remember thinking, I can’t believe I’m hearing all this great music in Crested Butte. We were young then, and so enthusiastic.
