Arts Council Opens Free Palmer Lake Arts Fest at Centennial Park This Weekend

Admission is free for three days of live music, hands-on classes, an artists’ market and a Saturday night star party — in the town that ran one of the West’s first Chautauquas.

PALMER LAKE — The Palmer Lake Arts Council opens its Arts Fest at Centennial Park on Friday evening, July 24, and runs it through Sunday, July 26. Admission is free. The weekend stacks live music, hands-on classes, an artists’ market, food trucks and a beer garden into the park at the foot of the lake — a spread the council frames as a modern echo of the Chautauqua movement.

The framing is earned. Palmer Lake hosted one of the first Chautauqua assemblies west of the Mississippi, an annual six-week “tent university” of lectures, concerts, debates and burro rides that ran in Glen Park from the late 1880s until 1910. Visitors came up from Denver and Colorado Springs on the Denver & Rio Grande, and a season ticket cost $2.50. The neighborhood still carries the name; many houses in The Glen started as Chautauqua tent cottages. The Palmer Lake Historical Society, which keeps that record and opened its museum to the public for History Day last weekend, has revived the name for its own event.

Friday, July 24

Friday is the short night. Ashtonz plays the band tent from 6 to 8 p.m., with beer, wine and the Pretzel Kings truck at the gazebo from 5.

Saturday, July 25

Saturday is the long one. Bagpiper Isaac opens with a parade at the bridge at 9 a.m. — he has opened all three years — and the music runs to nine: the Dead Buddies, a Denver indie outfit, at 2 p.m.; metalcore band Outage at 3:15; Red Rocks Rebellion at 4:30; and Skin & Bones, a female-fronted rock cover band, from 7 to 9 p.m. In between sits most of the teaching: yoga and tai chi at 8 and 9 a.m., a guided forest walk and journaling session on the Santa Fe Trail at 9, kids’ art through the morning, tie-dye all day, Zentangle at 1 p.m. and a drop-in paint-by-number class at 3.

The competitions land Saturday too. The “Paint the Lake” plein air contest registers painters at 8 a.m. for $20, turns them loose anywhere around the lake or town, and judges at noon; awards follow at 12:30, with $300, $200 and $100 for the top three. The photography contest — Palmer Lake subjects only, no AI images — hands out the same purses at 1 p.m., and the winning frame hangs in Town Hall for three months. At 1 p.m. the painter Karin Toppel demonstrates oils in the classes tent.

Then the sky. At 9 p.m. Saturday the Colorado Springs Astronomical Society sets up telescopes for a star party — the one event that depends on Palmer Lake’s dark skies rather than its daylight.

Sunday, July 26

Sunday runs gentler and ends Celtic. The Marble Family Band plays at 10:30 a.m., Anna Grace — a poet and singer — from 1 to 3 p.m., violinist Austin Johnson, a Monument teenager who plays with the Denver Young Artists Orchestra, at 3:30, and Cask and Chisel closes with Scottish and Irish pub tunes from 5 to 7 p.m. The classes tent turns over all afternoon: needle-felted wool with local artist Ryan Aragon at 10 a.m., building a two-dimensional Palmer Lake Star; hands-on ceramics at noon; phone photography with Krista Bobo and Jennifer Yoeli at 1; and an improv workshop at 3. Poets read at the gazebo from 1 p.m. and open the mic at 3.

All weekend

The art sales run both weekend days from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The council says more than thirty artists will show original work — painting, ceramics, sculpture, photography — and that vendor slots are full for the year. Food trucks work the gazebo from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday: Smokey D’s BBQ, It’s Just Pizza, Miami Sandwich Machine and El Taco King on Saturday; 4th Avenue Crepes, Hip Pop and the Pretzel Kings on Sunday, with XCR Coffee opening Saturday morning. Our food truck tracker follows the same trucks the rest of the week.

Who puts it on

The council behind it is a small 501(c)(3) with a volunteer board — a retired landscape architect, a retired engineer, a retired District 38 art teacher, a potter, a forest therapy guide — running on patrons and donations. Its other ventures are Off the Wall, Chautauqua, Performing Arts, Comedy Night, a year-round class program and Art in Public Places. For a town of roughly 2,500 people, a free three-day festival is not a small undertaking.

A hundred and forty years ago the pitch was that ordinary people had a right to know all they could know, and the town filled with tents for six weeks to prove it. This weekend the tents go up for three days, and the price of admission has gone the right direction: a season ticket to the Rocky Mountain Chautauqua cost $2.50. This one is free.

Getting there

Centennial Park sits on the north shore of the lake, in the middle of town — hard to miss. Get directions.