Green Light Art Festival to partner with First Friday, farmers’ market

The fifth-annual Green Light Art Festival will join forces this year with Greencastle First Friday on Sept. 1 and the Greencastle Farmers’ Market on Sept. 2, all of it taking place on the Putnam County Courthouse Square in downtown Greencastle.

Green Light Art Festival is hosted by the Putnam County Comprehensive Services art program, Green Light Studios. The studios exist to provide a creative outlet and potential earning opportunities for the persons with disabilities that PCCS serves in both their Greencastle and Greenwood service areas.

Greenlight artists receive 60 percent of all sales of their art, with 40 percent remaining to pay for supplies, space, marketing and program staff.

The art festival was born from the goal to have artists with disabilities creating, showing and selling their art side-by-side with artists without disabilities. This year’s festival will boast 40 vendors from across Central Indiana and Western Indiana, all showing their creations during First Friday festivities and during the farmers’ market on Saturday.

Those events will have an expanded footprint, coming off the square at Franklin and Indiana streets and extending east to College Avenue to accommodate the festival. Festival hours will be 5 p.m. to dusk on Friday and 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday.

The festival was canceled in 2020 due to Covid, and was last held in conjunction with Airport Appreciation Days in 2021. Organizers took a break in 2022, and with road construction making getting to PCCS more difficult this year, it was determined that joining forces with an already established events on the town square made sense to the organization committee.

The event is co-hosted with partnerships from the Putnam County Chamber, Main Street Greencastle, Pershing and Co., M2, Myers’ Market and the Greencastle Arts Council. Committee members include Andrew Ranck, Brian Cook and Heather Milbourn with PCCS, Madison Hanna with the Chamber, Suzzane Hassler with DePauw and the Arts Council, Russell Harvey with the Main Street, Kathryn Dory and Lynne Tweedie with the Arts Council, and local artist Lisa Cooper.