The Venue for the Arts Festival

The venue for the Arts Festival will be Riverside Church, a magnificent Gothic Cathedral on Riverside Drive constructed by John D. Rockefeller, originally for a Baptist congregation.  It looks out over the Grant’s Tomb and Riverside Park to the majestic Hudson making its way to the sea.

The Festival will not take place in the nave where services are held but in a large hall to the South where last year LDSSA held its annual banquet featuring talks by Elder Jeffrey Holland and Cardinal Timothy Dolan.  We are introducing temporary panels where the the art will hang, and there is still room for place to seat 300 for the Symposium and keynote address.

Allyson Chard looked all over the city for possible spaces to rent, and we finally selected Riverside because of its ambiance and generous space.  This is also the building that houses the three Heinrich Hofmann paintings, familiar to all of us, that the Church borrowed for an exhibition a few years ago, and in return conserved.  To get to Riverside you walk by Columbia University, Barnard College, and Union Theological Seminary.  So many cultural institutions are housed in this neighborhood, it is called “The Acropolis of the Metropolis.”

Richard Bushman