Joshua Price sat behind his scrap metal art booth — a steel animal zoo — nearly bouncing with joy Sunday afternoon.
His booth’s first appearance at Gainesville’s 33rd annual Downtown Festival & Art Show was met with a sea of passers-by who stopped to peer between the metal jaws of Price’s most popular scrap metal anglerfish.
The pieces — 205 in all — are made from materials collected at yard sales or donated from friends. Among those on display at Price’s booth were frogs with fork feet, owls with clock bellies and birds with silver butter knife wings.
“People don’t drop cats off at our house,” said his wife, Tiffany, laughing. “They drop off boxes of garbage.”
Meanwhile, her husband was wrapped up in the moment. As the traffic at his booth continued to flow, Tiffany, 34, said Joshua, 39, fed off the compliments on his art.
The Price booth was just one in a sea of more than 250 vendors positioned between City Hall and the Hippodrome State Theatre who came in from across the country for the two-day event, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.
More than 100,000 people crowded the streets, many walking their dogs and holding the hands of children wearing handmade crowns.
In an intersection near Bo Diddley Community Plaza, two chubby corgis drew a crowd when their leashes got tangled during their excitement at seeing a familiar pup face. A few blocks down, a woman rode a fake manatee down the street, and aerialists hung upside down from rings and white fabric.
UF students Genevieve Comeau and Lukas Christensen, both 21, stood outside the Price’s booth, admiring a pot of metal flowers.
Christensen, an electrical engineering major, said he has been coming to the festival for the last four years and enjoys seeing artists come together.
“It’s local culture,” he said. “I think it’s important.”
“There are artists that we’ve seen before that we are glad to see back,” Comeau, an entomology major, said.
It gives them a chance to revisit past artists and buy pieces they passed up in previous years, she said.
UF landscape architecture student Stephanie Gust, 43, was also on a return trip to the festival with her mother, Peggy Gust.
The two stood outside Port Orange-native Don Kaufman’s wood and corian art booth Sunday morning, admiring the 3-D photos.
From afar, the portraits of The Beatles, Lucille Ball and NASCAR stars looked like photos. Up close, the intricately cut white corian, a surface material harder than wood, shoots up from a black background, creating the 3-D effect.
“It started out as a hobby, and then it got out of hand,” Kaufman, 77, joked. He has been working on his elaborate pieces since he retired 10 years ago.
Stephanie and Peggy Gust bought three corian “Push and Pulls,” handheld devices used to pull out hot oven racks, as stocking stuffers for the holidays.
Stephanie Gust said she remembers Kaufman’s booth from last year.
“What was so impressive about it was the detail,” she said.
This year, the diversity of artists and a prevalence of handcrafted art has made it a standout event for her.
Some artists, like stainless-steel jewelry artist David Conroy, drove across the country to attend the festival.
Conroy drove two days from Baltimore to attend the Art Harvest festival in Dunedin, Florida, and decided to sell his nuts and bolts necklaces, earrings, bracelets and rings at the downtown festival, too. But on Saturday, he only sold $600 in jewelry, despite his $4,000 goal.
“It is frustrating at times, and I know what I do, and I know no one does it,” he said.
But other longtime vendors said this year’s attendance is up from previous years.
Sky Campbell and Sarah Hinds, Gainesville glass-blowing artists with Somewhere Glassworks, put up their colorful glass booth for the 10th year at the festival.
Their kaleidoscope-designed glass ornaments, pumpkins and vases brightened the street.
“This is our hometown show,” Hinds said. “Everyone is really loyal to this show. It really brings Gainesville out.”
