40 years of Sawdust

It’s a big year for the Sawdust Art Festival, which opens officially on Friday, June 30, for its 40th summer season.

The festival had its roots in the counter-cultural 1960s and still has some of the flavor of the era of hippies, free love, flower power and shoulder-length hair for men.

The Sawdust Festival started out as a “breakaway” art show for artists who were rejected from Laguna’s oldest art festival, the Festival of Arts, in 1965.

The only recorded history of the Sawdust Festival is a book of photos and writings compiled by Sawdust sales manager Jay Grant and other Sawdust stalwarts, published last year in a limited edition of 900 for the Sawdust community.

The book, “The Sawdust Festival: the Early Years, 1965-1979,” is being offered to the public for the first time this year.

“It is a labor of love,” Grant said of the book. “The old-timers were worried that our history was being lost. We wanted a true and accurate history because people were dying.”

That history was not cut-and-dried, according to Grant. The foment that resulted in the successful summer festival is lodged in the minds and fading memories of those who witnessed it.

To retrieve that history, Grant obtained two different accounts of the early years. One was written in 2003 by a founding Sawdust member, Dolores Ferrell Pevehouse, and another by a longtime and still current Sawdust artist, sculptor Dion Wright.

Ferrell Pevehouse was a key player in the formation of the breakaway art festival and gives a detailed factual account of how it came to pass.

Wright’s account, “A Child’s Garden of Sawdust” ? accurately subtitled, “Being an impolite and opinionated history” ? provides a glimpse of the colorful characters and inside politics that resulted in the festival, a melting pot of art and entertainment.

It all began, as many creative ideas do, with an argument among artists.

In the mid-1960s, so the story goes, the Festival of Arts began to “jury” their annual summer art show, and a number of long-standing artists were refused admittance. The “rejects,” as they were dubbed by the press, formed picket lines and mounted noisy protests.

The rejects included some artists with less experience than others, as well as practitioners of then-new and controversial forms of abstract and psychedelic art that were considered radical by the traditionalists.

Ferrell writes: “We rejected artists decided to let everyone know what was happening to us and agreed to picket the Festival of Arts before opening day. Notifying the press, we began our protest march in front of the main gate of the festival grounds. The news media loved it, and the picketing became big news in a local way.

“An insurance man, convinced that the publicity was bad for the Festival of Arts, offered [protest organizer Yvonne] Kenward a vacant lot he owned for a second art show in downtown Laguna Beach if she would persuade the rest of us to stop picketing. She accepted the offer, and the first vestige of the future Sawdust Festival was held in that vacant lot in 1965.

“It was called the ‘Rejects’ festival by the media. Approximately 30 artists set up on easels and other hastily formed display areas, running the show concurrent with the Festival of Arts.”

It took two years for the breakaway artists to organize a second “alternative” art show. Gallery owner and commercial artist Larry Kronquist ? another Festival of Arts reject, according to Wright ? provided a vacant lot on Coast Highway for the second alternative show, held in 1967.

That show brought back a hallmark of the original Festival of Arts, which had been rejected along with many of the original artists ? sawdust. The sawdust was needed to tamp down the dust and sand blown by ocean winds, but it became the unofficial moniker of the show in the press ? indicative of the relaxed festival atmosphere ? and the name stuck.

After the resounding success of that show, organizers secured a lease on a bucolic, eucalyptus-studded three-acre parcel on Laguna Canyon Road for an even bigger, better show the following year. They called it the Sawdust Festival and invited the public to visit the free art show “one block past the Festival grounds.”

However, at that point another argument broke out among the “rejected” artists over the touchy issue of whether a jury system should be imposed after all. Those who wanted to call themselves “juried” artists ? implying a higher degree of selectivity in the show ? left the original breakaway group.

The original group of die-hard non-juryists was left scrambling to assemble enough artists to present a bonafide festival. The group sent out invitations to 300 artists in the area and opened their arms to “experimental” and radical artists, including Wright ? whose sculpture has since been voted “best in show” more than any other artist, Grant said.

For their part, the dissenters set up a stone’s throw down the canyon road from the Sawdust. That breakaway-breakaway show became the Art-A-Fair, which also is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Art-A-Fair selects its exhibitors from applicants anywhere, giving it the right to call itself an “international” juried art show.

Within several years, the Sawdust Festival had become a summer fixture in Laguna Beach, and organizers were offered the chance to purchase the canyon land outright. With some trepidation they took out a mortgage, and the gaggle of rejected artists became property owners.

Over the years, the Sawdust has become known as much for its carnival atmosphere ? including at times a sword-swallower and gypsy wagons purveying bone jewelry ? and ever-flowing beer bars as for its artistic offerings.

Along with what Wright calls the “trinketeers,” there were always serious artists who simply couldn’t ? or didn’t want to ? fit the mold of the “juried” art world.

Attempts over the years to impose a jury system or to segregate the “serious” from the hobbyists have always failed, and organizers instead limit the show to Laguna Beach residents who survive a lottery system.

More than a few successful artists got their careers started at the Sawdust in those years, and some of them still have that long, flowing hair.

The festival will mark the official “Sawdust Festival Day” on Tuesday, July 11, with a grand celebration, including a re-creation of the Monterey Pop Festival at noon and a ceremony honoring longtime exhibitors.

Organizers promise that many of the colorful characters from the Sawdust’s past will be on hand to tell their tales.cpt.23-happs-5-CPhotoInfo1K1S81E120060623j18sjcnc(LA)Left to right: sales manager Jay Grant, 1975; singer Anna Banana, 1974; artist Ryan Gourley, 1971. Photos from “The Sawdust Festival: the Early Years, 1965-1979.”cpt.23-happs-6-CPhotoInfo1K1S81E320060623j18sk2nccpt.23-happs-4-CPhotoInfo1K1S81DV20060623j18sipnccpt.23-happs-3-CPhotoInfo1K1S89VA20060623j18si9nc(LA)2006 Sawdust Festival poster