The Annual National Shrimp Festival drew its usual crowds of locals and winter visitors to Gulf Shores in mid-October 2011, with boardwalk food vendors and steel-drum stages flanking the event’s two main art sections — a sprawling arts-and-crafts area and a quieter fine-arts row that wound past the festival stages.
Standouts in the Fine Arts Section
Daphne painter Joe Sheffield, working under his Something Southern banner, showed acrylic coastal scenes drawn from Daphne, Fairhope and Gulf Shores, pairing vivid backgrounds with crisp silhouettes of piers and fishermen for a clean, almost graphic quality. Frank Ledbetter exhibited gnarled robotic metalwork sculptures, while Chris Hartsfield’s photorealistic paintings took on Southern subjects from Maker’s Mark tumblers to Alabama football imagery.
Among the most talked-about pieces were Jeff Libson’s jazz-inspired bursts of acrylic color, with swirling lines of musical notation erupting from brass-instrument bells. Libson said he spent roughly 20 years teaching jazz composition in Miami before settling in Asheville, North Carolina, and taking up visual art as a second act informed by improvisation.
A Familiar Face From Mobile
Gulf Shores potter Steve Dark — an art appreciation instructor who also keeps a downtown studio and shows regularly at Mobile’s monthly art walks — displayed his eerie, cartoonish functional claywork, including lamp designs with expressive monster faces. His booth was briefly displaced during the festival to make room for other programming, a common frustration for artists paying booth and business fees at large coastal events.
The crafts side offered the expected shrimp-themed kitsch alongside more serious work: potters selling lamps and vases, bottle trees and feeders, and a Native American trio playing guitar, mandolin and pan flute between sets. Attendance was brisk but thinner than the spring Hangout Festival crowds, and the October weather cooperated where the May event’s heat had not.