Ahoy Anchor readers! Thank you all so much for coming out to the Porland Museum on September 27th and making our 12th annual Portland Art and Heritage Fair a success!
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 our race sponsor Fleet Feet.
After the race’s conclusion began the Fair itself! We were lucky to have more than 30 different tablers this year including Porland favorites Save A Lot, West End Weird Corp., Louisville Grows, K.C.’s Fired Up Forge, the Portland Festival, Lacie Eubank Made It, and more. Our beloved reporter Elijah Humble and I even got to table for the Portland Anchor, thank you to everyone who came up, grabbed a paper, and talked with us!
Returning to the Portland Art and Heritage Fair stage this year were the Louisville Leopard Percussionists who rocked the drums and mallets 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.
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, 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!
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 another amazing year.
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! Thanks to our sponsors Pace Contracting, FMS pbc, Portland Now Inc., Fund For The Arts, Fleet Feet, Grace By Design, QK4 Engineering Planning, Western Middle School, Lacie Eubank Made It, Farm to Fork Catering, Hand In Hand Ministries, Watrous Associate Architects, and Richard Meadows & Suzi Bernert In Memory of Edward K. Meadows.
