Akumal Arts Festival & Residency – 2022

 We are very excited about the upcoming Akumal Arts Festival & Residency of 2022. This will be the 4th year of the Festival and it wouldn’t be possible without the fabulous community support we receive.  The Festival was conceived as a community based, global initiative. The vision was to bring a fiesta of art to Akumal Pueblo through an international consortium of artists making art, engaging the community, enhancing and beautifying the town for locals and our many worldwide visitors.

When we first decided to create the festival we chose November because it was low season and it would be a way for the community to come together before high season and celebrate art and prepare Akumal to put its best face on to receive our visitors that we all depend on to keep our community going.  Due to the huge amounts of rain that mother nature has given us in the past few Novembers, we had to change the Akumal Arts Festival & Residency to January. It was not possible to paint during the month of November, do the children’s art projects and the entertainment in the cancha (which is all free to the public).

When we made the decision to change the date I had planned on housing over 80 of the artists in my Jungle Building in Rancho San Martín which I built to house scientists and artists that come to Akumal for ecological studies and contribute their artistic gifts to our community. This would be one of my gifts to Akumal to house a majority of the artists. Unfortunately the first week in October the entire development of Rancho San Martin was disconnected from CFE electricity and we have been working frantically to have it restored – it has been 2½ months and I am not confident that we will have it restored in time.

The entire festival staff and artists are volunteers – nobody profits monetarily from the festival. This is a labor of love for Akumal and our community. When we conceived this idea for the festival it was to help improve the appearance of the Akumal, give the children an opportunity to experience art in the schools, and celebrate the fabulous culture of Mexico through the night time activities.  We have painted over 380 murals in the past few years, taught hundreds of art classes, and have provided 2 full scholarships for 2 children of Akumal to attend University – one for art and another for nursing.  During quarantine we created a soup kitchen at the Community Center and a food bank at the Hekab be Library and Activity Center. We were also able to completely renovate the Hekab be Library and Activity Center, build a cancha in the community center for the Taekwondo Program (which has 150 kids participating weekly), are currently building an interactive play water fountain park behind the police station, built a cooking classroom on the secondary/high school to teach cooking,  and the list goes on and on.