MINCO Music & Arts Heritage Festival May 16th & 17th, 2020 The MINCO (Mineral County) Music & Arts Heritage Festival 2020 will be celebrating Leslie Thrasher, Piedmont native and famous Liberty Magazine illustrator. We are looking for sponsors, monetary donations, and items for our Leslie Thrasher window displays in the downtown Keyser businesses during our MINCO Music & Arts Heritage Festival in May 2020. The idea is to have New York style window displays of scenes in the style of his artwork that were on the covers of Liberty Magazine and have his artwork in the background during the month of May. The Mineral County Museum will also have a display of Thrasher. We are also creating art events with regional artists to painting/drawing/photography in the style of Thrasher. An art display of local artists inspired by Thrasher’s style will be displayed at The Indie on Main during the month of May 2020. It will be a juried exhibit with prizes. The two day festival will also have music performers, car shows, games and competitions, arts and crafts, unique items, workshops, and other events.
Born in Piedmont West Virginia, Thrasher was well known as an illustrator for Liberty Magazine. In 1912, Thrasher sold his first cover painting to the Saturday Evening Post. His illustrations were known for their light-hearted, humorous reflections of everyday American life, with colorfully animated characters set against a white background. He ultimately completed 23 covers for the Post, as well as covers for Everybody’s, Collier’s, Red Book, Popular Magazine, and many other publications. He produced advertisement illustrations for such companies as Chesterfield Cigarettes, Cream of Wheat, DuPont, and Fisk Tire. In 1926 he agreed to complete a cover a week for Liberty Magazine over a six year period. This series was titled “For The Love o’ Lil” and became a favorite among readers. The series followed the lives of an average middle-class couple, Lil Morse and Sandford Jenkins. The series became so popular it was later made into a movie by Columbia Pictures and is considered the prototype for today’s soap operas. Norman Rockwell, a friend of Leslie Thrasher, wrote in his autobiography that Thrasher “painted one of the most famous Post covers ever published. I still get letters from people who think I did it. It depicts a lady and a butcher standing on either side of a scale in which lay a chicken. The lady was pushing up on the scale; the butcher was pushing down. The cover appeared on 3 October, 1936.”
The MINCO Music & Arts Heritage Festival delivers regionally inspired entertainment to promote interest and investment in Keyser’s downtown local businesses. For more information on how to get involved with the Thrasher downtown displays or the art show, please call Jill Baldinger at 304-788-1461 or email at mijill@frontier.com.
MINCO Music & Arts Heritage Festival Highland Arts Unlimited PO Box 63, Keyser, WV 26726
