Much to see and do at Eco Fair, Art Festival

GLEN RIDGE, NJ — Glen Ridge Arts Patrons, or GRAPA, held its decades-old arts festival Saturday, May 7. The event took place at Glen Ridge High School while below, along Ridgewood Avenue, the ninth annual Eco Fair was on. According to Lou Mercurio, co-president of GRAPA, the arts festival is the oldest, continuous festival in the borough.

“The Eco Fair is part of us,” he said. “We invited the fair to join us.”
The arts festival is a fundraiser for scholarships given to GRHS seniors who want to pursue a career in the visual arts. Booths of craftsmen lined the avenue.
“We charge a fee for the booths and sell food,” Mercurio said about scholarship money.

Money from the festival also goes to help art teachers, throughout the school district, with their expenses, he said

“It’s the only GRAPA fundraiser,” Mercurio said.
The students who are to be awarded the scholarships this year are Margaret Marino, Olivia Boss and Brent Hartwell.

“It’s a wonderful union,” Mercurio said about the fusion of the arts and ecology. “It gives the town many displays.

Art is exhibited in the high school and middle school.”
Mercurio said his organization is proud to be putting on the fair.
“As far as we are concerned, raising money for scholarships and furthering the arts in Glen Ridge is very gratifying.”

His co-president is Joanne Diglio.
Elizabeth Baker, of the Glen Ridge Environmental Advisory Committee, said the Eco Fair was subsidized by GRAPA and the borough. She called the fair a community service encouraging people to see all their environmental options. At the event, she was handing out white pine seedlings.

About the ecology, she said plastic recycling use to be a money-maker but it is not anymore since China stopped accepting the plastic. “Sadly, we may have to go back to dual-stream recycling,” she said. “Like Bloomfield.”

Glen Ridge now has single-stream recycling. This means that paper can be
commingled with plastics. Dual-stream recycling requires residents to separate the materials. Baker’s concern is that borough residents would have to be re-educated after seven years of single-stream discipline.

“Single stream really did boost recycling,” she said.
Glen Ridge, at one time, used Green Sky as its recycling collector. Now it cannot.
“They went out of business,” Baker said. “We’re ‘hat in hand’ with other recyclers. We desperately need a company to get by on recycling. We don’t have as good a deal as we did with Green Sky.”

Up the embankment of the high school, a troupe of dancing singers were performing songs for the Broadway smash “Hamilton,” the hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton.

Mercurio said art is as important as any other school subject, maybe even more so.
“Future mathematicians need art,” he said. “It’s one place where students can have an idea and have something that’s tangible.”

He said no matter what interests a student, math, biology, anything, in the end, it is art that gives the student something tangible, something they can hold in their hands.

“If you do math, at the end of the day, you have nothing but math on the paper,” he said. “But art gives you something tangible. Art and math work well together.”
So do the Arts Festival and the Eco Fair.