Today, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin celebrates it’s 50th anniversary with an all day affair: everyone’s invited to Fifty Fest, a free birthday party from noon to midnight on Saturday, April 27. The event will feature live music, art-making activities, family programs and exhibition tours, and will serve as the public launch of the museum’s new brand and graphic identity. It’s the cherry on top of a banana split of of special programs, including a gala, and the museum’s current exhibition, Through the Eyes of Texas: Masterworks from Alumni Collections. A selection of Austin’s favorite food trucks will supply the calories.
The festival will take place in the Blanton’s two-building complex and outdoor plaza and features live performances by T Bird and the Breaks, Brownout, Navasota Strings, The Ransom Notes, DJ Tarek, and Minor Mishap Marching Band, Story Time in English and Spanish for families, read by Univision personalities Gustavo Monsante, Regina Rodriguez, and William Castro, tours with costumed characters, a T-shirt screen-printing station.
The museum will also offer a preview of Creative Connections, a program in which musicians, poets, and other members of the creative community will present artistic responses to works in the Blanton’s collection. The Texas Reed Trio, featuring musicians from UT’s Butler School of Music, will open up their rehearsal to the public at 1pm, and immediately following, Donald Grantham, composer of Music for the Blanton and Steve Parker, artistic director of the acclaimed SoundSpace series, will discuss the ways in which music can respond to visual art. Another program will feature poetry readings by Vive Griffith, Jenny Browne, and others who have written poems in response to art in the Blanton’s collection, and at 4pm, Nic Nicosia, a Santa Fe-based conceptual artist and photographer whose work is on display in Through the Eyes of Texas, will discuss his artistic process.
The whole schedule is online here.