The African Festival of the Arts is on hiatus this September after 35 years in Washington Park, but organizers promise to return next Labor Day weekend.

Organizers made the decision to take a year off just a month before the four-day festival was set to commence, citing the rising costs of putting it on.

“Everything went up,” said Patrick Saingbey Woodtor, the festival’s founder and the president of Africa International House in Woodlawn. “We decided to just wait and see if we can do fundraising before we can come back in full force.”

Closing out the summer for more than three decades, the festival immerses attendees in the art, flavors and sounds from across the African diaspora. Set up like a village, it has brought artists from around the world to the South Side park, including from Nigeria, Kenya, France and Canada, the Caribbean and South America.

But hosting all the vendors, performances and programming doesn’t come cheap, Woodtor said. The rising cost of booking talent, festival infrastructure (things like tents and gates), liquor licenses and other fees forced festival organizers to operate at a loss of almost $850,000 last year.

Woodtor said the festival’s financial woes stem back to the 2008 financial crisis, when it lost 75% of its sponsorship. Finances never fully recovered, and then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, which dramatically reduced attendance. In 2018, more than 80,000 people came out for the four-day event. The past two years, attendance has hovered at around 20,000.

At the same time, ticket prices have gone up. The once free festival cost $20 last year for advance tickets, $30 for a weekday and $40 for a single weekend day. But raising prices hasn’t been enough to make ends meet. Woodtor said that last year’s festival lost so much money that he still owes some vendors.

The weather hasn’t helped, either. “(The last) 10 years, it’s rained almost every year,” he said.

Despite the shrinking crowds and vendors, many longtime attendees are mourning the loss of a one-of-a-kind festival.

In a recent piece for the Chicago Tribune, Laura Washington, a columnist for the paper, lamented the years-long decline and eventual hiatus of an event that long provided her a “well-trodden path” to her African heritage and culture.

“My mama was an African aficionado. She traveled extensively on the African continent, and the festival was where she acquired much of her prized art collection,” Washington wrote. “We would jaunt about the sprawling fair for hours, hanging out at her favorite booths, catching up with family and friends.”

Woodtor and his wife moved from Liberia to the U.S. in 1980, fleeing political turmoil that erupted after the country’s president, William R. Tolbert Jr., was killed in a military coup.

The couple brought a lot of folk art they collected from their home country to Chicago, where they had gone to college, and sold pieces on street corners before opening a shop in South Shore. The Woodtors moved their wares to Hyde Park a few years later, settling in the since-demolished Harper Court, then a sunken plaza of mostly arts-oriented merchants and other creatives.

Open from 1983 until its closure in 2000, Windows to Africa sold goods from African and local Black artists.

At that time, Woodtor said, Black and African artists struggled to get their work into Hyde Park’s 57th Street Art Fair and other venues. Once, when several Black artists attempted to set up booths near the fair, someone called the police.

“When that happened, we said, ‘We don’t have to go through that, we can just create our own event,’” he recalled.

His shop had already been hosting fashion shows, yard sales and drumming showcases in the plaza, which he estimated drew between 20,000 and 30,000 people.

“We had demonstrated in Harper Court already that there was a support base for Black events, for Black art,” Woodtor said. “When we came together, it was basically a way to showcase and promote Black artists.”

These events eventually outgrew the space, and the festival kicked off in 1989. Originally called the Aya Festival, named for a Ghanaian symbol of endurance and resourcefulness, the fest took place in a different location each year, including around Hyde Park, at the Field Museum and the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, 740 E. 56th Pl. It settled into its Washington Park home in the new millennium.

As the festival grew, so did its star power. Music icons who’ve graced its stages include James Brown, Sonny Okosun, Isaac Hayes, Baaba Maal, Shaggy and Ahmad Jamal.

This year’s hiatus follows the end of two longtime area festivals, the Silver Room Block Party and Hyde Park Summer Fest. Organizers for both festivals also cited rising costs as a primary reason for ending the events.

But Woodtor says this isn’t the end of the African Festival for the Arts, just a break. At 74 years old, he plans to spend the next year getting more sponsors and bringing new leadership into the fold, to help the festival reach younger generations as its original audience grows older.

“We need to find a way to get the young folks involved and let them take it and make it their own,” he said.