This concludes our series honoring the 2026 inductees into the Plein Air Easton Hall of Fame. In this final article, Al Bond, who helped launch Plein Air Easton, shares his thoughts on this year’s honorees and the more than two decades of work that built the festival into what it is today.
Five Hall of Fame inductees with five very different stories.
A volunteer who solved logistical problems few people ever knew existed. An educator who built programs for the festival’s youngest participants. An organization that helped provide both guidance and a home for the event. A photographer whose images became the visual history of Plein Air Easton. A patron whose enthusiasm for artists and collectors turned her home into one of the festival’s favorite gathering places.
At first glance, Ron Engle, Sue Bredekamp, the Waterfowl Festival, Ted Mueller, and Suzan Brice have little in common. But Al Bond sees it differently.
“These are all people who were involved, not necessarily from the very beginning, but in the formative years,” Bond said. “They were people who were interested in providing some real value, but were also interested in being part of something bigger than themselves, and engaging with the community. It was as much a social connection to other people as it was about the plein air project by itself.”
Not one of this year’s inductees is being honored for putting paint on canvas. “They all found different ways to engage,” Bond said.
When Plein Air Easton began in 2004, there was no way of knowing whether it would become a one-time success or something much larger. “There have been layers of recognition over the years,” Bond said. “In the very first year, the fact that we were attracting nationally known artists was an indicator that we had something going on, and the fact that our sales were well above our expectations, we kind of knew that we had something. We weren’t quite sure what it was, but it was worth pursuing.”
But Bond said the festival’s success wasn’t measured only in sales.
“It was really several years later when we started to see people that had no connection, people that we did not know, out there handing lemonade to artists and taking part in authentic ways,” Bond said. “It was apparent that our community was owning the event, and that really was an important realization and moment.”
By then, Plein Air Easton was also growing fast. Within its first five years, sales had grown enough to make it the largest event of its kind in the country. “First we got the attention of top artists,” Bond said. “Then it became something way bigger than just an Avalon project.”
That growth depended on volunteers willing to take on real responsibility. One of the festival’s guiding principles, Bond said, is that the quality of everything matters, including the quality of a volunteer’s experience.
While talking with this year’s Hall of Fame inductees, a theme kept recurring: more than one traced their deeper involvement with Plein Air Easton to a lunch with Al Bond.
“I can’t deny it,” he said.
Ron Engle is one of the clearest examples. He had already proven himself as a volunteer when Bond invited him to lunch, asking him to take on one of the festival’s most demanding assignments: hanging roughly 600 paintings, most of them still wet, in the span of a few hours.
“Ron came up with logistics and systems that made hanging the paintings very efficient and fast,” Bond said. The job required more than speed. Because the artwork is created in the days leading up to the show, Bond said there’s no way to know what’s for sale or what it might be worth until it arrives. “The paintings didn’t exist the week before, and we didn’t have any information about them until they showed up in the morning. They were for sale that same evening.” Engle built systems to track sales information as fast as the paintings came in the door.
Sue Bredekamp brought a very different set of skills to the festival. With a background in early childhood education, she had written a textbook used nationwide to train teachers in the field, and recognized early on that Plein Air Easton could engage its youngest community members through what would become the Next Generation program.
“Sue sticks with it,” Bond said. “We didn’t figure it all out in the first year. We had things that worked well and things that didn’t work well, but Sue really engaged in an iterative way where we figured out what the program really wanted to be, and refined it.”
Bredekamp has been with the festival since year one. Beyond Next Generation, she later took charge of organizing festival headquarters, building a system to orient visitors and volunteers who might not know Plein Air Easton at all, or might not know the right questions to ask. Others had done that work before her, Bond said, but she institutionalized it in a way that has made it sustainable long after she stepped back from running it day-to-day.
Bond credits the Waterfowl Festival with helping shape Plein Air Easton before the first artist ever set up an easel. The two events share more than a hometown.”We are both in the events business,” he said. “We understand one another’s trials and tribulations.”
Early on, Bond sat down with then-Executive Director Judy Price and asked her a simple question: if she could start the Waterfowl Festival over with a blank chalkboard, what would she do differently? Her answer became something close to a blueprint. She told him to avoid shuttle transportation wherever possible, since it’s expensive and complicated to manage. She also told him to skip food vendors and lean on Easton’s own restaurants instead, something the Waterfowl Festival hadn’t been able to do in its early years because the town didn’t yet have enough restaurants to feed everyone.
By the time Plein Air Easton launched, it did, and Bond built the festival to send that foot traffic downtown rather than to a row of vendor tents.
Ted Mueller provided another kind of quiet support.
“You have seen Ted Mueller photographs if you’ve paid attention to Plein Air Easton at all,” Bond said. Mueller wasn’t the festival’s very first photographer, but he became its primary one for most of its existence. “That’s a meaningful volunteer commitment,” Bond said.
Photography, though, was only part of what Mueller gave the festival. For years he also managed the private property list, tracking down homeowners willing to open their land to competing artists during the event, places the public never gets access to but that make for extraordinary subjects. The job came with its own headaches. Artists would call Mueller mid-search because their GPS had sent them to the wrong address, since Google Maps and Apple Maps didn’t always agree on where a property actually was. Sorting that out, over and over, for over a decade, is the kind of work that rarely gets noticed.
“He’s a true unsung hero,” Bond said. “I would venture to say very few people understand how much time he gave.”
For Bond, Suzan Brice’s legacy had less to do with the paintings she collected than the example she set for others. She brought her family down for the week every summer, and it became a fixture of their summer together. Bond said other people watched her build that tradition and started building their own versions of it, whether with weekend guests or family.
Brice’s home was small, but everything in it was chosen with care. “Suzan loved beautiful things, but they did not have to be big and garish,” Bond said. “The perfect little gem is exactly what Suzan was always on the hunt for.” Following her death in 2016, Plein Air Easton introduced Small Painting Sunday in her memory, a fitting tribute given how much she valued small, well-chosen things in a home built around exactly that.
Looking at this year’s Hall of Fame class together, Bond sees five different paths that all arrived at the same place.
“That is part of what makes me happy about the event,” he said. “Whatever door you’re coming in, there’s a way for you to engage in Plein Air Easton that is personally meaningful to you.”4
That, Bond said, has always been the larger goal.
“The mission of the Avalon is fundamentally about building community, and the arts are the tools in our toolbox to bring people together and convene community. There are so many people in our community who have lasting relationships with artists because of Plein Air Easton, and so many who have made lasting friendships among themselves.”
Bond compares it to the Stone Soup parable. “We might have put the pot of water out and thrown the stone in, but everybody else brought their carrots and onions and whatnot that made it actually a meal.”
Four individuals and one organization. None are being honored for the paintings they created. All are being honored for helping create the festival itself. Together, ideas became a festival, and a festival became a community.
