Meyer Art Festival 2026: All Was Right on the Brick Road

It was 6:30 in the morning and the brick road lay open in front of us.

As the sun came up over Stanwood, city crews circled the block in their trucks and set out the road closure signs. We started pulling tents out of the Meyer and putting them up along the street. That is how the Meyer Art Festival begins: an ordinary downtown block, a few hours, and a lot of hands.

Then the rain started coming down hard.

Wagons full of art, in the rain

We kept working. It kept raining. The artists began arriving in cars, and out came the wagons — loaded with canvases, racks, prints and pottery — bumping down the brick road one load at a time.

The Boy Scouts stepped in and carried the heavy things. They helped every artist move their work from the car to the booth. It poured. Some artists had raincoats, some had umbrellas, some stepped straight into the puddles. All of them got wet.

Eventually the booths were up, the art was under cover, and the artists could rest.

The Scouts and the sump pump

The rain quieted. The Boy Scouts stood surveying the street, and they saw a problem they knew they could solve: standing water, pooled across the old brick.

They spent the next hour bent over those puddles with a sump pump, working through them one at a time until the water was gone.

The puddles had been eradicated. The sun came out. The art fans arrived. And all was right on the brick road that day.

What the day looked like

By mid-morning the street was full. Artists who had arrived soaked at seven were selling work by eleven. Families came through with strollers and dogs. The smell of food trucks drifted down the block.

At the Sun Prints booth, visitors arranged ferns and leaves on treated paper and let the sunlight do the rest, walking away an hour later with a deep blue cyanotype of their own. The big printed banner behind the table — ferns ghosted across a field of blue — went to the silent auction.

A few tents down, board member Gaylynn Beuthien ran the Wire Art table: coils of bright aluminium wire, a pile of pliers, and an open invitation to sit down and bend something into shape. Plenty of grown adults did.

Inside the Meyer

While the street filled up outside, classes ran all day in the building. In one room, a painting class worked through a landscape together, easels end to end down a long table, an instructor moving between them.

In another, a fused glass class cut and arranged coloured glass into panels, heads down over the work with glass cutters and running pliers.

Music all afternoon

Live music ran on the stage through the day, and the sponsor banner hanging behind the band is worth a look on its own: this festival happens because local businesses pay for it to happen.

A look ahead

One tent drew a steady line all afternoon: a virtual reality station, where visitors took a turn with a headset while everyone else watched on the screen beside them.

Thank you

To the artists who unloaded wagons in the rain and were open for business by mid-morning. To the Boy Scouts, who carried the heavy loads and then went and found a sump pump. To the city crews who closed the road at dawn. To the volunteers and board members who ran the booths, the teaching artists who ran the classes, the musicians, the food vendors, and the local businesses whose sponsorship pays for all of it.

And to everyone who came out after the rain stopped. See you on the brick road next year.