XL Arts

After 50 years, festival still raising fun for the arts

Just over 50 years ago, Peggy Frary dropped by the late Clara Driscoll's former home, Laguna Gloria, to pick up one of her husband Michael's paintings. The decaying villa was being used as a place to exhibit art.

UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

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Fiesta founder Peggy Frary, left, enjoys one of the earliest art sales at Laguna Gloria, an event she made into a party as well as a sale with Amman Roe and Betty Smith.

Austin Fine Arts Festival

• When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday
• Where: Republic Square
• Cost: $5-$8, children age 12 and under free

Art After Dark

• When: 7 to 10 p.m. Saturday
• Where: Republic Square Park
• Cost: $55
• Information for both events: 458-6073, www.austinfineartsfestival.org

"I was new to Austin," says the London native, recalling the Lake Austin estate, now part of the Austin Museum of Art. "There was only one person there, Mrs. Webb, a fragile little thing, barely 80 pounds.

"I said, 'You have a gorgeous place here. Why don't you fix it up?'

" 'We have absolutely no money and no support from anywhere. We're going to have to close the place down,' she said.

"I said, 'My God, this is terrible.' "

Frary responded by organizing a few wives of University of Texas art and architecture professors who had traveled and collected art in Mexico to create a Mexican-themed Fiesta, a sale to benefit Laguna Gloria. They scissored paper flowers, daubed a few temporary booths, borrowed a mobile canteen from Camp Mabry and hoped people would show up.

The first Fiesta, in 1956, netted $1,500 — and saved the building.

Later, Fiesta matured into one of Austin's most cherished traditions, outgrew the shady confines of Laguna Gloria, moved downtown to Republic Square and was redubbed the Austin Fine Arts Festival. A few hundred showed up in 1956; tens of thousands are expected Saturday and Sunday.

The two-day event now benefits the Austin Museum of Art (successor to Laguna Gloria Art Museum) and UT's Blanton Museum of Art. And this year, organizers have added Art After Dark, which combines samples of fine food, performing arts and access to the art by 220 exhibiting artists for an evening extension of the daytime festivities.

Back in 1956, the number of participating artists arrayed on the villa's grounds could be counted on two hands, but included the biggest names — Charles Umlauf, Ralph White, Michael Frary, etc. — in Austin's much smaller art world.

"At first it was just an art sale," says Ruby White, widow of Austin Arts Hall of Famer Ralph White and first president of the Women's Art Guild. (An earlier event, the Texas Arts and Crafts Fair, was launched at the City Coliseum in 1951.)

"But then Peggy changed it to Fiesta to bring in families and children — and so we could sell beer."

Beer was a popular, almost transformative addition, as was "outdoor plumbing," meaning portable toilets, in the 1960s.

"That was a great advance," laughs Lael Seagert, first director of Laguna Gloria when it incorporated officially as a museum in 1962. "There just wasn't a lot of money. The poor little place was in terrible trouble. We all used to park on the street to make (attendance) look big."

The early organizers agreed that another breakthrough was persuading the Junior League to adopt the estate's gatekeeper house as its headquarters. That brought new energy — and business savvy — to the event.

"It was lot of hard work, believe me," White says. "One year it rained so hard, we were sloshing around with mud in our boots. The husbands helped by laying palm fronds for the tops of the booths."

Back in the mid-1950s, women like White and Frary propped up the museum building however they could.

When the ancient boiler at Laguna Gloria sputtered out, Frary responded by hauling firewood and newspaper every day to the site from her Balcones-area home in order to heat the building. To keep younger attendants occupied at Fiesta, she brought her children's toys, cordoned off an area with chicken wire and put her maid in charge of the improvised play area.

All of those personal contributions — enshrined now in scrapbooks and stories retold to younger generations — were overshadowed in the intervening years by the millions of dollars that poured into the museum from the event.

"It allowed us to do what we could do," says former Laguna Gloria director Laurence Miller. "Fiesta was always absolutely crucial to the success of the museum."

mbarnes@statesman.com; 445-3647