Portland Art and Heritage Fair number 12 has come and gone, and we hope you had a chance to attend! Read on to learn about the many offerings that made this a year bound to bring home Oscar gold!
2025:
Now Streaming
The day started strong with the annual Portland Almost 5K, where over 80 people took the trip from Lannan Park to Shippingport Island and back! Two young boys took home the gold and silver, with an athletic set of parents following not far behind for bronze while pushing a stroller! If you’ve been up the hill that is the Shippingport bridge you know how impressive a feat that is! We had so many attendees we had to break out leftover shirts from years past, so a rainbow of runners repping years as far back as 2019 braved the course and competed for prizes from Fleet Feet!
After the race’s conclusion began the Fair itself! We were lucky to have more than 30 different tablers vending artwork, craft, information, and of course food and drink. With the recent addition of a 50-foot shrimping boat to our backyard tablers got to spread across our acre of green more than usual this year, giving the whole three-building campus life!
Returning to the Portland Art and Heritage Fair stage this year were the Louisville Leopard Percussionists who rocked the drums and mallets with songs from the Beach Boys and more for a little under an hour. This was the first gig of their season, so many a young percussionist made their triumphant debut here at the Fair!
We celebrated the performance with show posters printed in our own Beech Grove Press by CeLOUbrate Print‘s Erica Lewis, who provided demonstrations alongside the posters themselves all day. Percussionists, parents, and visitors of all kinds got a rare look into the letterpress tradition.
Continuing to venture inside the Museum one would find the opening of our newest exhibition Driftwood: The Life of Harlan Hubbard. Curated by Jessica Whitehead, author of a book by the same name covering the same subject, the exhibition features original artwork by and artifacts from the iconic naturalist’s life alongside murals by our own Danny Seim! Make sure to visit Portland Museum before the end of 2025 to see the exhibition for yourself.
Speaking of Hubbard, remember the shantyboat designed after his that we debuted at last year’s Fair? Well, the H.A. Hubbard had another moment in the spotlight this year when the Good River String Band performed their acoustic stylings on its deck! Jodie, Julia, and Jannell killed it, with one of the shanty’s original builders Art Baltes even on-site to watch!
And while we’re following up from past events, how about the Puppet Videomaking Camp we hosted earlier this summer with Squallis Puppeteers? Well, we were honored to show the completed videos all day during the Fair in our oral history booth and played them as an opener to the 4×3 Film Club later that day.
We love a good waterway pun, but this year’s Fair was subtitled Now Streaming in reference to the 4×3 Film Club which took place at sunset that day! Curated and projected by Ryan Daly, a selection of short films, animation, music videos, and more oddities from his personal archive were shown off on film to visitors in our backyard. With the shrimping boat as a backdrop it made for a memorable night to cap off an amazing Fair.
Thank you to all of our friends and neighbors that visited us on this very special day. We can’t wait to see you all again, and here’s to another great year!
Please be sure to support our wonderful event sponsors!
Richard Meadows & Suzi Bernert
In Memory of Edward K. Meadows
Deanna O’Daniel