The Art Market at Cheat Fest
The Art Market is a semi-circle of quality arts booths with prime access to the main Festival area. Juried artists fill these booths with offerings of all varieties! In the past we have enjoyed pottery, glassworks, jewelry, prints, paintings, and so much more.
We hope that you enjoy this year’s artists! Bio’s and a sample of work are available to peruse below.
Acquired Taste, Monique Rowe
Monique Rowe is a self-taught pyrography (wood-burning) artist that makes plaques, kitchen items, and more. She has been wood-burning for over 8 years now, and enjoys creating and selling her art full time.
The Artisan’s Menagerie, Matt Benson
Made from silver, gold, and precious and semi-precious stones right here in WV, Matt creates simple, elegant, unique, jewelry for everyday wear or special occasions. His work is driven with a passion for both art and design, and includes pieces to fit any budget.
Blackwater Alcoves, Sandra Frank
Sandy has a deep love of color, wool, and mossy green spaces. Pragmatic and fantastical, felted wool is the best of both wrapped up in one material. Wool panhandlers, trivets, and catch all bowls have great utility without sacrificing an opportunity to add some beauty and joy to the mundane. Her work is inspired by the wetland textures of the bogs and forest that surround her home at Blackwater Alcoves in Canaan Valley.
Chrissy Zeltner, Chrissy Zeltner Photography
Chrissy Zeltner is a local nature and wildlife photographer who captures images of the wild things as well as the every day beautiful things like leaves floating in water reflecting the sky. You can find her with her camera hiking the trails or snorkeling and kayaking the Cheat River.
Cily Citrus, Natalie Henson
Natalie is an artist from Appalachia obsessed with nature, learning from the land, and sharing the beauty of the natural world through her work. Using foraged botanicals and upcycled clothing, she creates art that keeps materials out of landfills and invites others to care for the environment through creativity. Her work includes sun-printed Cyanotype on thrifted clothes and prints, as well as resin fruit, flower, and fungi earrings.
Drawn in Stone, Darci Macur
The beauty of combining stone and wood was introduced to Darci early, as she grew up watching my parents build a log cabin with a hand cut slate floor on the banks of the Cheat River. This is also when she discovered the fun of bringing home pockets full of cool rocks. She first started experimenting with creating art out of stone over 10 years ago and it’s grown and evolved as she realized that she loves working with wood almost as much as stone. The latest evolution, adding resin into her process, started as a supply-shortage necessity that turned into a fun challenge of exploring the ability to add depth to her pieces and expand her color palette of rocks.
Eddie Spaghetti Art, Eddie “Spaghetti” Maier
Eddie has a reverence for nature and love of the outdoors, and uses his creative talents to share Mother Nature’s bountiful gifts of beauty. While he predominately works as a printmaker, he is also adept in other mediums including pottery, batik, mural painting, and just about anything art related. He feels blessed and grateful for his artistic talents but his success has come from years of hard work and dedication. He grew up feeling most connected with clay and making pottery on the wheel. But, after learning woodcut printmaking while on a study abroad to Australia, he found his calling.
Elemental Art Studio, John Finley and Linda Girardi
John Finley has been painting and drawing since he was young. Drawing from skills learned as a carpenter, he has been doing artistic woodwork for the past thirty years. His inspiration is derived from his lifetime spent hiking, climbing, kayaking, fishing and skiing in the wilderness. His paintings express his love for wildlife and especially the mountains. His woodwork uses natural edges and unique patterns to make tables, boxes and decorative pieces evocative of forms seen in nature.
Linda Girardi is interested in translating the beauties, wonders, and peculiarities of natural and urban environments into art. Inspired by her father, a lifelong gardener and landscaper, she learned the names of trees and flowers at an early age. She began working in mosaics in the early 1990s, repurposing broken plates and dishes into pots and art pieces. Around 2014, she started to produce kiln-fired (fused) functional and art pieces. Over the next two decades, she continued to learn new techniques in glass fusing, while also continuing to create mosaics. Most recently, she has been producing mini and micro mosaic jewelry working with various media, including talian filato glass.
Fruit Bug Crochet, Lily Barratt
Lily is a self taught crochet artist of four years from West Virginia. I love using new and recycled yarn to create functional and colorful handmade crochet pieces.
Homestead Luminary, Jessie Tymoczko
A longtime fascination with light and shadow led to the creation of Homestead Luminary. She combines drawings and classic imagery to create wooden luminaries, lamps, lanterns, and shadow casting light boxes. Jessie leans heavily on art nouveau influences in her creations, but is also inspired be the natural world and elements of art throughout history. Designs are cut and etched on a laser engraver and hand assembled with vellum light diffusing paper. An LEW candle or corded light is included with each piece.
Icelandic Ponies, Dani Martin
Dani Martin sources high quality fabrics from across the world to create high quality, one of a kind clothing and bags. Each item is lovingly crafted, with close attention to detail and color. She makes a wide assortment of items for a variety of people.
Kula Tie Dye, Mary Jo Schick
For over 30 years Kula Tie Dye (formerly Cool Runnings) has offered high quality, vibrantly dyed adults and children’s clothing and accessories, guaranteed to wash and wear beautifully. This year, she has expanded to include dyed quilting cotton and rayon from which she plans to make a variety of items – including hangings, scarves, dresses, skirts and pants.
Lockhouse Studio, Lisa Giuliani
Lisa Giuliani is a studio artist, small business owner and community activist located in Morgantown, West Virginia. In her home studio along the Monongalia River, you will find her in the studio with her two dogs. She works primarily with mid-range stoneware, using a white slip-dipped surface that allows her to move between wheel-thrown and handbuilt forms with ease. This material gives her the flexibility to explore detailed line work and carving. Carving into red, leather-hard clay is the point in the process where her ideas fully take shape, and where surface and form begin to intersect.
Monongahela Media, Mark Moody
Mark is a West Virginia–based photographer specializing in film photography, fine art photography, and wet plate collodion work. Through Monongahela Media (Mon Media), his work focuses on documenting the landscapes, people, and character of West Virginia with an emphasis on craftsmanship, process, and timeless storytelling.
Mountain Creek Glass, Sarah Hoblitzell
Mountain Creek Glass is a stained glass studio based in Masontown, West Virginia, creating vibrant, handcrafted pieces that blend traditional Tiffany-style craftsmanship with fresh, modern inspiration. Drawing on Appalachian nature, culture, and storytelling, each work transforms light, color, and texture into bold designs that shift throughout the day.
From intricate suncatchers and ornaments to custom panels, Mountain Creek Glass captures both the timeless beauty of glasswork and the personality of unique, contemporary subjects. Every piece is carefully designed with glass chosen not only for its color, but for the way it interacts with sunlight—rippling, glowing, and shimmering in unexpected ways.
Rooted in tradition but unafraid to explore the unexpected, Mountain Creek Glass celebrates the connection between art, light, and lived experience.
Muddy Mindi, Mindi Rockwell
Mindi Rockwell is a ceramic and glass artisan from the rolling hills of Philippi, WV, who skillfully crafts imaginative and unique clay creations, capturing the essence of her surroundings.
Nativibes, Ben Kolb
Ben is a passionate, versatile, nature craving folk-impressionist. He uses different mediums to produce his work, including watercolor, acrylic, coffee, oil, and coal. His connection with the natural Appalachian atmosphere fuels his art, and he believes in the positive energy that he draws from his surroundings stays with the pieces he creates and is passed on to the new owner, which is something he calls “Nativibes.”
He says, “ My inspiration and subject matter has always been the beauty that surround me during my travels, the mountains, streams and lakes that are part of my blood come out in every piece that I create. I put my heart and feelings on canvas and hang it up for everyone to see, feel or share. It is my hope that when each of my clients take a piece of my work home, they get to experience the joy that created it”.
Ridgetop Pottery, Susan Ramey
Susan creates handmade, wheel-thrown, functional porcelain pottery. She adds hand-built elements like handles, glazing in colors that invoke images of sky, mountains and moving water.
Rockables, Katie Mullins
Katie makes one of a kind jewelry by hand using a variety of gemstones, feathers, dried florals and intricate seed bead designs!
RVA Petal Party, Kimberly Griffiths
Kimberly Griffiths, the artist behind RVA Petal Party, creates intentional, botanically inspired jewelry crafted with real pressed flowers and plants, preserved with professional resin techniques. Each piece reflects a deep appreciation for the natural world and the artistry found in its smallest details.
“Celebrate Nature, One Petal At A Time”.
Sacred Totems, Moment Johnson
Moment is a maker at heart, always exploring new creative outlets and hands-on projects. For the past five years, her passion has been creating stone mosaic necklaces using a technique called intarsia—seamlessly combining small stones into an intricate design. Inspired by the peace, beauty, and connection felt in nature, she combines different natural stones into wearable landscapes—creating nature from nature. She hopes each pendant carries a bit of what we experience in untouched, wild spaces.
Sarah’s Soap.A.Saurus, Sarah Cartron
Soap·A·Saurus is a soap company based out of Aurora in West By God, Best Virginia and creates handmade, cold process bar soap and other skincare products. Our solid natural body products are long lasting, travel friendly, self preserving and are free of synthetic preservatives. All items are environmentally friendly, palm oil free, locally sourced (when possible) with plastic free packaging to help reduce our carbon footprint.
What makes Soap·A·Saurus great is that we like to keep you clean, and make sure you have fun doing so. We are a one stop shop, and our line includes solid hand and body bar soap, shampoo bars, hair conditioner, face wash and more! All products are created in small batches to make sure you receive quality handcrafted products.
