ORANGE — The “festival that stinks” has had to stink remotely this year, as it has been moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Organizers of the annual North Quabbin Garlic and Arts Festival decided it was in the public’s best interest to hold the event virtually this year, and efforts have been made to offer the next best thing in these unprecedented times. The festival is typically rife with entertainers and local vendors that anyone can now find on the internet.
The festival announced a new YouTube channel (bit.ly/3d4zMYo) and expanded website featuring more than 120 original and archived videos to come as close as possible to the in-person experience. The festival’s Facebook page also posted links to each of the exhibitors, performers and presenters.
“People have been appreciative,” said Lou Leelyn, who runs the event’s social media presence and serves as an artist coordinator with Diane Nassif. “I think that we created a weekend that feels like the festival as much as we can.”
Leelyn said organizers decided in August to hold the event virtually, because the pandemic many thought would be winding down by then was still going strong. She said organizers reached out to regular exhibitors to ask if they had any online content they could provide.
“And many of them created new content, so that was fun,” Leelyn said.
She and Nassif, who manages garlicandarts.org, said the pandemic forced organizers and exhibitors to get creative and stretch their skill sets to create something for the online venue. Nassif said many exhibitors — which include musicians, cooking demonstrators (often with garlic) and healing arts practitioners — have skills that “lend themselves to being virtual.”
“People can go to garlicandarts.org and poke around and get a feel for the festival, even though it’s not taking place on the field,” Nassif said.
She mentioned organizers held their meetings online.
“It was a lot of fun. It was a nice break to get to know each other in a different dimension,” she said.
The festival has been able to make contributions each year, totaling more than $45,000, to groups and organizations that propagate agriculture and the arts, wellness and renewable energy, and economic and racial justice. For 2020, the festival provided a loan to the Cooperative Fund of New England’s COVID-19 emergency fund, and gave grants to the North Quabbin Food-A-Thon, Great Falls Books Through Bars, the Nolumbeka Project, Pioneer Valley Workers Center cooperative farm, The People’s Medicine Project, the Shea Theater Arts Center, Valuing Our Children, Franklin County People’s Fund, and a pottery kiln and supplies for the makerspace at LaunchSpace.
The first festival was held in 1999 at the Seeds of Solidarity Farm, which proved too small. Orange resident Dorothy Forster enjoyed the festival and offered to hold future ones on her 128-acre property, which once held a dairy farm her father ran from 1926 to 1941.
The festival is said to average around 10,000 people per weekend.
Reach Domenic Poli at: dpoli@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 262.