Cherokee Triangle Art Fair Set to Celebrate 50th Anniversary

The Cherokee Triangle Art Fair will return for its 50th anniversary. Photo via Cherokee Triangle Art Fair Facebook page

The Cherokee Triangle Art Fair will celebrate its 50th anniversary this year, following a two-year hiatus due to Covid-19. The event will be held on Saturday, April 30, and Sunday, May 1.

Per tradition, artists and food vendor booths will be located on the streets surrounding Willow Park in the historic Cherokee Triangle neighborhood — Cherokee Parkway between Willow Avenue and Cherokee Road. Live music also returns to the Willow Park gazebo. Also per tradition, admission to the festival is free.

The triangle-shaped neighborhood has a fascinating history, in part owing its existence to city expansion to the East from what was Louisville’s main thoroughfare, Broadway, which ends at Cave Hill Cemetery. The festival itself began in 1972 as a small event at Highland Baptist Church, designed mostly to gauge interest in such an event.

Initially, the festival was also designed to include craftspeople from the neighborhood, and when the event moved to Willow Park it was necessary to measure trees and other obstacles when plotting the first booth locations, according to a 1976 Courier-Journal article.

“Everyone stopped and asked what we were doing,” Mary Lengfellner, a leathercraft artist and fair organizer, said in that article. “They thought we were going to put up a new sidewalk.”

By just a few years later, the Cherokee Art Fair had established a review process to make sure only high quality art was displayed. Another C-J story, in April 1981, quoted furniture craftsman Phillip Kerr as saying, “It’s a matter of organization, publicity and quality of the crafts on display.”

In calling the Cherokee Triangle event “one of the prime ones,” Kerr added, “Some fairs let in a lot of junk. The good ones don’t.”

Forty years after Kerr’s endorsement, the fair is still highly regarded as one of the top art fairs in the region, a juried event with more than 200 vendors. The festival is open 10 a.m.-6 p.m. each day of operation.