Arts Council expecting thousands of visitors to commemorate milestone

James Chambers was just 17 when he was first introduced to the Temple Terrace Arts & Crafts Festival. It was the event’s second year, and Chambers was working for the city’s recreation department.

His job? “They told me to go pound stakes in the ground, so the artists knew where to set up,” he said.

He hammered in 35 or so stakes with numbers on them into the ground at Riverhills Park, for the 35 artists.

Now, decades later, Chambers, a Temple Terrace City Council member and president of the Temple Terrace Arts Council, has played a continuous role with the festival, along with just over a dozen loyal volunteers who work year-round on the project. They help to ensure the marquee event’s longevity, which is celebrating its 50th year this weekend at Woodmont Park.

The two-day event is free to everyone, and will be held Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m.-4 p.m.

The brainchild of Julia Ames, the first arts festival had roughly 30 or so artists, who set up — without tents — that first year in 1973 at the Temple Terrace Community Church on Inverness Avenue. The following year, it moved to Riverhills Park, and the number of participating artists and crafters have ballooned in number over the years; there are 166 signed up for this year’s event, which include fine arts, craft art and culinary art.

This year’s event will also include, for the first time, emerging artists competing for prizes for the first time. Like what the Gasparilla Festival of the Arts does, the Temple Terrace event has encouraged high school artists to submit their work to be judged.

“We’re excited about this,” said Elaine Coniglio, a Temple Terrace Arts Council member. “The past few years we’ve had some students ask if they could split a table, so we just decided we’d put up this big tent, call it Emerging Artists and fill it with as many people as want to display their art and have it judged.”

Other artists will be competing in a variety of categories as well. The event will award $6,000 in prizes, including top three finishers for painting, sculpture, fine crafts and photo and mixed media.

Two $1,000 prizes are awarded for Best in Show and Best of Craft.

There will also be a children’s area where the young ones can make a craft and bring it home with them.

“That area is wild,” joked Sharon Gaskin, a longtime organizer and current first vice president in charge of charitable donations and sponsorships for the Arts Council.

On Saturday, the live entertainment includes The New Horizons Band, Fran Johns and the Swing Gang Dancers, Hot Tonic Orchestra — described on its website as “postmodern jukebox meets Amy Winehouse” — Florida College Unplugged and the FCA Academy Chorus.

On Sunday, the artist breakfast and awards ceremony will be held at 8 a.m., with more entertainment from Charlie Imes, the jazz band Scott Murley Quartet, the Brown Bag Brass Band and its New Orleans sounds, and dancers from the Elevate Dancers dance studio in Temple.

The Arts Council, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing arts and culture to the Temple Terrace community, has also designed a commemorative logo for the 50th anniversary. Shirts and tote bags bearing the logo had been “selling like hotcakes,” according to Gaskin.

“Since it’s our 50th, we want to make a big deal of it, obviously,” she added.

Gaskin is expecting roughly 6,000 visitors over the two days. There will be eight food trucks on hand as well.

The shirts and other festival activities are possible because of an increase in support from local businesses, and a large nearly $12,000 donation from the family of Marjorie Schine, a longtime and beloved Temple Terrace community volunteer and activist.

Schine, who passed away in 2013, was one of the founders of the Arts & Craft Festival. She would have turned 100 years old on the first day of the festival this year.

To honor her and the festival she helped start and devoted her time to growing for decades, Michael Schine — her son and head of the Clark-Schine Family Foundation — made the donation and are title sponsors.

“It was very serendipitous for us (on our) 50th anniversary, you know, we got that nice donation,” Gaskin said.

The festival has also created a Marjorie Schine Award, which will be given out just this year and will be an artists choice award.

Humble beginnings

The event, which costs roughly $30,000 to put on, has grown from modest beginnings to become the largest event of its kind in northeast Hillsborough County. The arts festival committee evolved into the Arts Council and took on arts projects throughout the city; the festival remains its premier event.

While it started with just three dozen artists, the festival has had as many as 300 back in its heyday in the mid-1980s through mid-1990s when it was held at the larger Riverhills Park, its site from 1974-2014. Police reported that as many as 10,000 people attended some years, 5,000 each day.

In the early days, three clubs ran the festival — Temple Terrace Woman’s Club, the Temple Terrace Junior Woman’s Club and the now-defunct Temple Terrace Kiwanis Club. Each club pitched in $50 for seed money, said Chambers.

The Temple Terrace Woman’s Club ran a concession area, “which at the time was a couple of tables and a coffee pot.”

Chambers said the Temple Terrace Kiwanis Club, which no longer exists, handled the drink cart and cooked up hamburgers and hot dogs, and the Temple Terrace Junior Women’s Club was responsible for helping where needed.

In 2014, it had to move due to the hazardous cypress tree roots at Riverhills Park and the school needing to fence itself in for security, and tried the spacious Greco Middle School campus, which offered plenty of flat land for the artists to set up their tents and for people to walk around.

But it wasn’t the same without the cypress trees and the “ambiance” of the park, as well as sweltering heat. In 2016, the Arts Council had already decided it would move on from Greco after one more year, but mother nature intervened as a tornado ripped through the first night of the festival and caused it to be canceled for Sunday.

It was the only day in 50 years the festival wasn’t held, according to Chambers (it was held virtually in 2020 during the pandemic).

After leaving Greco, the festival found its current home at cozy Woodmont Park, beneath a canopy of trees, abutting the first hole of the Temple Terrace Golf and Country Club.

The fact that the festival is 50 years old is a testament to its loyal volunteers, support from the city and Temple Terrace’s commitment to being a home for art.

When it started, there were but a few festivals like it in Central Florida. While the Gasparilla Festival of the Arts is 53 years old, the Temple Terrace Arts & Craft Festival predates larger festivals like the Downtown Dunedin Arts Festival and the Mainsail Art Festival in St. Petersburg.

Chambers says he has pretty much never missed a day of the festival. He said the weather is almost always good, it’s a great place to eat and enjoy the day walking around, you can even pick up a few Christmas presents.

People come from all over to pack the event with a festive atmosphere, and it shines a positive light on the city that Chambers has always called home.

“I’m not an artsy guy,” he said, “But I love the arts festival.”

The Arts & Crafts Festival is free to the public. For more information, visit TempleTerraceArtsCouncil.org.