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The Festival Store

Fashionable Festival visitors wear their Festival love!

The Festival Store will be open during Festival 2023.  Located right on Calder plaza, shop for your favorite shirts, caps and accessories – including this year’s commemorative Festival poster.

All proceeds from the Festival Store help fund our operating expenses, so thank you in advance for helping to support Festival.

P.S. Our gear is great for gift-giving, too!

About the Festival 2022 Poster

I hope this work shows my love of Festival as a community arts celebration. I used bright, bold colors, and focused on “La Grande Vitesse” – the center of Festival. The heavy shadows represent bright sun (we hope!) at noon on the first Friday of June, the official start of Festival. The green circles represent the parks and green spaces of Grand Rapids, and the water at the bottom represents the Grand River. And the words “art”, “dance”, “music” and “food” float above the Calder sculpture and the Sun logo.

The poster by the numbers:

  • 14″ x 19″ – the size of the original seed bead embroidery (all done by hand!)
  • 83,000+ – the number of size 10 glass seed beads used to create this work.
  • 300 – hours of work
  • 9 – the number of needles I broke in the process!

– Colleen O’Rourke

Colleen O'Rourke - Poster Artist

Colleen O’Rourke is a Grand Rapids-based artist and proud Festival brat, whose parents, Tom and Lynne, were longtime Festival volunteers. Colleen is well known for her intricate hand-sewn work with tiny seed beads. Using a simple needle and thread, she transforms the beads beyond their traditional role as adornment, and puts them in the spotlight as a fine art medium. Colleen’s work has been accepted at the Festival Regional Arts Exhibition more than 15 times. Colleen holds the distinction of being the only artist with family members who were also chosen to design the Festival poster: Mom Lynne, in 2002, and brother Kevin, in 1994.