While this may have been the winter of our discontent, the Portside Arts Center is dialing up the annual Lehigh Avenue Arts Festival a few months earlier than usual to kick-start this spring with art in the River Wards. The festival (LAAF) will be held this Sat., April 26 from noon until 8PM along Lehigh Avenue from Aramingo Avenue to Almond Street.

“We’re excited about this festival,” Kim Creighton, Director at Portside Arts Center, said. “We moved it to April this year for several reasons. The Shadfest was cancelled at Penn Treaty Park and that was a place where we used to raise a lot of money for our scholarship fund. We also figured it will be the first festival out of the winter—we’ve had a tough one so I think everyone will be excited to get out and play a little bit.”

LAFF is Portside’s largest fundraising event of the year. The money raised goes toward the Portside Scholarship Fund, which makes it possible for families of limited resources to participate in Portside’s various and eclectic art programs.

“Whether they are children that we’ve noticed are not being taken care of properly, or we hear a family story and recognize that they can’t afford art classes, or if one of our present customers hits a rough spot and can’t come in anymore—we try to help people out like that,” Creighton said. “If someone comes to us with a story and a genuine concern, whether we know them or not, we will give them a scholarship if we have it.”

With schools cutting arts and music classes left and right, Portside provides an enormous variety of classes for any student including drawing, painting, music, dance, upholstery, spin art and more. Founded in 2007 by Creighton, a local mosaic and metal artist with more than 20-years experience, Portside looks to fill the art void in the Philadelphia School District—a district where, as of 2006, 45-percent of schools lacked a full-time art teacher. Now, more than 1,200 children, teens, adults and seniors receive year-round visual arts, musical arts and performing arts classes 6-days a week in Portside’s two visual art classrooms, performing arts room and a music studio with private lesson booths.

“We did a survey a couple of years ago and out of 41 schools only 13 had part-time arts and crafts,” Creighton said. “We saw a need and started the after school programs. The arts have been out of school for a really long time out here— maybe in the wealthier areas of Philadelphia they have arts classes but down by here it’s maybe just a science teacher doing a collage with the kids.”

Because LAAF is happening in spring, a large portion of the money raised will benefit scholarships for Portside’s Summer Arts Education program— a 10-week summer camp that introduces children aged 4-12 to the fundamentals of arts education via hands-on visual arts and arts integration activities, as well as character building exercises and field trips. The all-encompassing curriculum features drawing, painting, printmaking, clay sculpture, mosaic, collage, puppetry, found object sculpture and more of what Creighton calls “hardcore art.”

“We have excellent teachers and some of our interns from last year are back for this year’s summer camp as teachers, they have their certifications,” Creighton said. “We have some great interns coming in to help us out through the whole summer and we are going up to August 29th. The Festival is the start of everything, several of the kids have already contacted us for scholarships, so we’ve had to tell them to call back after the festival because we do give some scholarships away for the summer camps.”

What can you expect at this year’s LAAF? New additions to this year’s festival include an antique car show along Aramingo Ave and the first ever Philly Puff! Inflatable Sculpture Competition, which will be held in the inflatable sculpture garden from 2-4PM.

“We like the way that the Kinetic Sculpture Derby brings a different element to the Trenton Avenue Arts Festival so we figured we’d try out the first inflatable sculpture contest in Philadelphia,” Creighton said.

Lehigh Avenue will also be full of artisan merchants and arts tables scattered throughout the crowd, so you can get your face painted or work on some bottle art while browsing the vendors’ various wares. There will also be printmaking, drawing contests and hat making peppered throughout the festival grounds, as well as Philadelphia food trucks selling delicious treats throughout the day. Vendors and food trucks in attendance include Vittles Food Truck, The Real Latin Food Truck, Nomad Pizza, The Foo Trucks, Yours Exclusively Desserts, G&G Grafix, Christian Galagarza ReJewelry, Jane Broadbent Pottery and so many more. Live music will be provided by the acts like Bossom Band, Muffin Man The Mad Doctors and Swedeland.

The Portside Arts is expecting a great turnout for their flagship event and hopes to see the entire community out to support art education in Philadelphia. You can find out more about the festival by visiting www.lehighavenueartsfestival.org or www.portsideartscenter.org.