A new Sarnia art festival is looking to make a mark in the city's downtown.
The first ALT Walk street festival, featuring a variety of artwork at 63 booths, goes this Saturday on Christina Street.
Organizer and local artist Eric Watt said he wanted to create an event that was different from Sarnia's Artwalk, a 16-year event which is currently on hiatus.
Watt said ALT Walk features no banks or corporations, and no products bought wholesale and then sold.
"Just over the last four, five years people stopped getting booths at Artwalk, and I just went 'you know what, I think I could do one where the focus is a little bit more on having artists instead of what's going on here,'" said Watt. "So then I just started planning and ran into it without knowing what I was doing and went 'I'm going to start an event!' and it went from there."
Watt said ALT Walk is about supporting and involving the entire artistic community, including the "starving artist."
"So it's $65 per booth and if there's money left over people are refunded their share of that money, so the price could go even lower. If we get more people next year we could get the price down to like $30, $40 which is a small barrier to entry for anybody that just wants to sell something."
ALT Walk poster for the inaugural event.
The event will not feature any food because Watt wants to encourage festival-goers to eat at downtown restaurants.
Watt, the president of the non-profit ALT Walk Creative Collective, said the event is all about the art.
"We've got people that do stained glass, we've got people that knit, there's a movie studio in town that's going to have some of their stuff, there's some musicians, painters, people that draw, there's some pop culture art stuff to do with superheroes and things like that," he said. "There's tones of stuff and I like that it's so diverse because Sarnia is a diverse place. There's some people participating from out of town as well -- mostly it's local people from here and the surrounding area, but there is just tons of people in this area that are really creative."
ALT Walk is set for August 17 from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Christina Street between Wellington Street and Lochiel Street.
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