Misty weather unsuccessful dampening Ocean Breeze Art Show

By NANETTE LoBIONDO GALLOWAY

VENTNOR – It may have been a little warm, humid and misty Saturday but the ocean breeze kept everyone cool inside the Ventnor City Cultural Arts Center.

The annual Ocean Breeze Art Show kept vendors busy all day explaining to customers how they make their beautiful arts and crafts. About 30 vendors, most of them local artisans, set up tables filled with paintings, jewelry and hand-crafted items, in hopes they would relinquish their “starving artist” reputation.

Renee Leopardi teaches portraiture, landscapes and seascapes at the arts center, mostly in the evening hours, and still finds time outside of her regular day job working in an office to make her own paintings. On Saturday, she had several of them on display inside the arts center.

Ocean Breeze organizer Sue Van Duyne Hunter, who manages the arts center, bought one of her paintings. It was a miniature beach landscape with a Ventnor City lifeguard stand and a wooden surfboat in the foreground.

“My brother and dad built those boats,” Van Duyne Hunter said.

Her family has been making surfboats for generations that many consider unsinkable and quick to respond to water emergencies. They also fare well in summertime lifeguard races, which are exciting to watch and often bring home championship wins for Downbeach Beach Patrols.

Lizzy Morris of Philadelphia had a table set up to sell her Lizard’s Stuff creations. She was a resident of Ventnor for about five years after the COVID-19 pandemic and recently moved back to Philadelphia.

She was selling her ceramic creations, which she learned how to make by taking classes taught by Van Duyne Hunter at the arts center.

“I take her classes and then fire my creations in the kiln at the back of the arts center,” Morris said.

Business was good for the Ocean Breeze on Saturday, she said.

“Some things are priced higher than people want to spend, but the smaller items sell well. They keep me in business,” Morris said.

Mayor Tim Kriebel and his family attended the event and ran into two-time Ventnor Teacher of the Year, Theresa Kennish, who taught Kriebel’s daughter Anderson language arts literacy at the Ventnor Educational Community Complex. Today, Kennish is retired from teaching, but she is hard at work making art.

Outside the art center, artists and their customers huddled under canopies to dodge the misty but sporadic raindrops.

One gentleman explained the intricacies of creating glass art at his studio at WheatonArts, formerly Wheaton Village in Millville, famous for its American Glass Museum.

The Ventnor Cultural Arts Center also houses the spacious Ventnor Branch of the Atlantic County Library, and the Ventnor City Historical Museum. Historical Society volunteers, former Mayor Tim Kreischer and Cindy Mason Purdy, whose father founded the society, were entertaining visitors and working to maintain the society’s extensive collection of historical artifacts, including a centerpiece Atlantic City Boardwalk Rolling Chair, framed photographs and memorabilia of the city’s historic Beach Patrols, and catalogs of old newspapers detailing the history of the seaside resort.