Boulder City Magazine is a monthly publication full of information about Boulder City and Southern Nevada. Boulder City Magazine features the Boulder City Home Guide, a real estate guide to Boulder City and Southern Nevada.

Boulder City History
by Dennis McBride
Boulder City Museum & Historical Association

Boulder City Hospital Auxiliary
Art In The Park - 1963

When the Bureau of Reclamation announced in 1954 that it would no longer subsidize Boulder City’s hospital Boulder citizens walking door-to-door raised enough money to keep it open as a community-operated institution. A year later, women who had been volunteering at the hospital formed a fund-raising auxiliary with the goal of expanding the old hospital and eventually building a new one.

The Boulder City Hospital Auxiliary raised funds in a variety of ways, but it wasn’t until 1963 that the auxiliary founded its best known fund-raising effort: Boulder City’s annual Art-in-the-Park.

An outdoor art festival was a new idea in Southern Nevada. It was first suggested by auxiliary members Ruth Richey, Eloise Blue, and Isabel Austin. Planning began early in the summer of 1963 and the art show itself was scheduled for “noon to twilight” on Saturday, August 31 in what then was known as Government Park—today’s Wilbur Square—below the Bureau of Reclamation’s administration building.

The auxiliary pulled together an impressive array of Nevada nabobs to support the event: the Honorary Committee included Nevada Governor Grant Sawyer, Senators Alan Bible and Howard Cannon as well as Representative Walter Baring. Lt. Governor Paul Laxalt was a member, and so were Clark County Commissioners Lou LaPorta, Bill Briare, and Ralph Denton. Among the festival judges was noted Nevada artist and photographer Gus Bundy, while the festival’s featured artist was James Swinnerton, whose dreamy desert landscapes had brought him great fame—and who also invented the newspaper comic strip. The last time Swinnerton exhibited his work in Boulder City was in 1933.

No one was sure whether the art festival would be successful—August is very hot in Boulder City. But at day’s end, more than 1,000 people had crowded the park from noon till twilight. All the paintings on exhibit were sold in sealed bid, 70% of which went to the hospital building fund. Auxiliary president Marge Swallow presented a check for $3,000 to the hospital.

Sara Denton, one of Art-in-the-Park’s original planners, called the weather service after that first festival to see if there wasn’t a more clement weekend than the end of August for the 1964 festival. She determined that the consistently best weather in Boulder City occurred the first weekend of October—and so that’s been the festival’s date ever since.

In the ensuing 41 years, Art-in-the-Park has spread out of Wilbur Square to include north and south Escalante Plaza and Bicentennial Park, and runs two days instead of one. In 2000, the auxiliary handed sponsorship of the festival to the Boulder City Hospital Foundation. By 2004 Art-in-the-Park was drawing more than 200,000 visitors and income for the hospital approached $200,000. What had begun as a local fundraiser for a community hospital has grown into one of the Southwest’s biggest cultural events and one of the city’s most enduring traditions.

Sponsored by the Boulder City/Hoover Dam Museum.




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