Live music reverberated from the stages and tented booths lined the pathways at Dawes Park this weekend at Evanston's Ethnic Arts Festival.
More than 100 cultures were represented at the event as artisans and merchants came to the lakefront park to sell their wares and global cuisine. Evanston residents filled the walkways, perusing tables piled high with beaded necklaces and other ethnic jewelry displays and racks of clothing brought from handicraft vendors from as far as Sri Lanka. Visitors sampled food such as Indonesian chicken satay, Mediterranean chicken and vegetable pita sandwiches, and the Celtic Knot's fish and chips.
The City of Evanston Cultural Arts Division sponsored the annual festival, now in its 23rd year. The Illinois Arts Council also partially supported the free event, which aims to celebrate diversity in the community through art and cultural performances.
"The goal is really inclusion, and it's also kind of a fantasy experience that you experience the ethnic cultures around the world as someone living in Evanston," said Laura Epstein, program manager for Evanston's Cultural Arts Division.
The festival held 22 performances in two days, including Congolese percussionists Tambours Sans Frontieres and Senegalese hip-hop group Gokh-Bi System as headlining musical acts. Multicultural storyteller Linda Gorham, whose modern folk tales call for audience participation, also spoke.
"Evanston is a salad of a lot of different cultures coming together. Everybody is unique, and when you walk up and down aisles where the booths are, that's exactly what you see," Gorham said.
The storyteller said her favorite part of the festival is walking among the tents and viewing the work from the more than 125 artists who came to display their work.
"I have gone every year for the last three or four years and I have been able to tell stories on the stage, and then go around and spend the money," said Gorham, whose said her favorite part of the festival is walking among the tents and viewing all the local artists and their work.
Families and children participated in art activities with a variety of cultural backgrounds, including face painting, poetry writing, origami and Ghanaian fabric decoration with Northwestern's GlobeMed.
"A lot of times ethnic groups and their artistic identities are not really well known in these communities, so I think it's great for social awareness," said Tatsu Aoki, who teaches Asian-American art at Northwestern and is the artistic director of the Japanese American Service Committee Tsukasa Taiko, a drumming ensemble that also played the festival lineup.
"The event is kind of important in that the body of the ethnic community is also in that area."
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