Lehigh Valley artist Jessica Bastidas, who just received a Linny Award from Artsquest last Thursday, has crafted the 2019 Musikfest poster, Artsquest announced today. With imagery that evokes the industrial past of Bethlehem Steel and the adaptive reuse of the brownfields and Bethlehem’s North side as the Musikfest grounds, the poster is an amalgam of previous and present.
Bastidas is a fine artist and arts educator from Bethlehem and a graduate of the Lehigh Valley Charter High School for the arts who now teaches at Mount St. Joseph High School in Baltimore. In a prepared statement Bastidas said, “My concept for this piece was really informed by my own experiences growing up in Bethlehem, playing down by Sand Island as a child, sneaking under the steel plant gate to peruse the abandoned buildings in my teenage years and, as an adult, attending the numerous festivals and events at SteelStacks. Through this illustration, I hope to capture the optimism and energy that made the transformation from abandoned factory into thriving center of arts and culture possible.”
The Musikfest poster artwork, of course, will be seen far and wide on the Musikfest mugs that are pervasive throughout the course of the festival, as well as on t-shirts and other merchandise available throughout the year. Musikfest, one of the largest festivals of its kind in the nation, returns for its 36th iteration next August 2-11.