The Warwick Summer Arts Festival is Orange County’s premiere performing Arts Festival presenting music, theater and dance in locations around the Town of Warwick. We look to present original work that is both challenging and inspiring and to bring the arts out to every part of the community: the parks, the storefronts, and the farms, and to produce the performances with the highest production quality possible. Our intent is always to involve the community by offering pre-festival workshops and presentations and to continue to look for ways to bridge the artist/audience roles as we have with the establishment of the annual Art Parade and with the commissioned performances involving community members such as Martha Bower’s Local Heroes and JoAnna Medle Shaw’s Dancing With Horses. In 2003, we established The Children's Festival Choir who performed at the Gemini concert in July.

In seven years, we have presented over 100 artists at various locations around Warwick. We have presented workshops at the Community Center, Warwick Valley High School, The Bookstore, Wisner Studios and the Moving Company Dance Studio. The Warwick Summer Arts Festival 2001 all took place within the Village and inspired the first Arts and Culture Week declared by Mayor Michael Newhard. Highlights of past festivals include JoAnna Mendl Shaws Dancing With Horses performed by four dancers and six horses and their riders; The Eric Bass Sandglass Theater, Dierdre Murrey’s String Ensemble, the renowned experimental violinist Leroy Jenkins, and the establishment of the first ever Art Parade down Main Street. Festival 2001’s Celebration of the Drumset with Newman Taylor Baker was highlighted in the prestigious Drummers World Magazine.

The summer of 2002 was a significant turning point: every event, from the poetry readings to the films to the concerts was crowded with enthusiastic audiences. The Town adopted the Festival as its own. We displayed the work of over 20 visual artists in the storefronts of the Village of Warwick; ran weekly art making workshops leading up to the Festival (for the Art Parade); presented a New York Foundation for the Arts grant writing workshop; added film to the roster, presenting a screening of Strange Fruit followed by a talk with the filmmaker; and added an evening of Spoken Words at the local Bookstore. Highlights of the summer included the James Emery Trio playing at sunset out on the Black Dirt farm of Bob Scheuermann; the community created performance, Local Heroes, at the Winslow Therapeutic Riding Center, and the final evening concert, Tom Chapin at Stanley Deming Park, with a crown 1,000+.

The New York State Council on the Arts gave unprecedented support to jump-start The Warwick Summer Arts Festival. We are now in need of additional funding in order to continue bringing quality programming to Orange County. The Festival is being funded under the umbrella of Community 2000, a not-for-profit organization.