Art and soul coming to Richmond this Saturday

Richmond Main Street and the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts will team up this weekend for Saturday’s Spirit & Soul and Richmond Arts in Motion festivals. The back-to-back events will kick off at 1 p.m. on MacDonald Avenue between 13th Street and Harbour Way.

Attendees at the Spirit & Soul festival can enjoy live music by acts like Andre Thierry and blues diva Tia Carroll, food trucks and a MacDonald Avenue wine garden constructed for Saturday’s event. Booths highlighting the wares of local vendors like Joanne’s Boutique and BJ’s Eye Specs Optical Boutique will also be on display.

The event is a great way to bring the community together and a time to celebrate the revitalization of downtown Richmond, said Amanda Elliot, the executive director of Richmond Main Street. “That’s what Spirit & Soul is about,” she said, “to be able to connect with your neighbors, local business people and community workers.”

Capping off Saturday’s festivities is Richmond Arts in Motion, an event sponsored by the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts. From 4-8 p.m. MacDonald Avenue will turn into a carnival with activities like face painting, henna art and even a petting zoo outside of the center’s building on the corner of MacDonald Avenue and 11th Street. Student performances and a staged script-in-hand reading of Mattie Mae’s, a brand new play about World War II-era Richmond, will take place inside the center’s theater space.

San Francisco-based artist Scott Snibbe will unveil and dedicate an interactive artwork display at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts building at 6 p.m. A $150,000 “Our Town” grant from the National Endowment for the Arts allowed the center to commission the piece, which will be a permanent display on the exterior of the center’s historic Winters Building. The new-media piece will highlight four video screens on the building’s exterior. Three of the screens will feature video projections of pre-recorded performances by the center’s faculty artists and students shown in silhouette, said Charlene Smith, the EBCPA’s director of development. The fourth screen will allow pedestrians to see themselves and introduce color patterns on the remaining screens through their own movement, she said.

“Scott Snibbe’s work appears in national museums, but there are no other major installations of his work in any other part of the Bay Area,” Smith said. “That’s why we’re excited.”

For more information about the Spirit & Soul and Richmond Arts in Motion festivals, visit the Richmond Main Street and East Bay Center for the Performing Arts websites.