Arts Activities Support

Over 4000 attendees came to our Live on the Drive events throughout the summer of 2016 and were exposed to 3 different artist groups. Over 1/4 of attendees were attending for the first time this summer and every attendee we engaged with, left an overwhelming positive response to our concert series. Our artistic goals for the 2016 Live on the Drive concert series covered three areas, the artistic performances, and the audience/community and community awareness. Our first goal was to bring a “diversity of artistic talents together… to highlight their talents and to provide public arts programming where there is little.” Through our three concerts we featured three diverse artistic performers. Our performers were Rio Nido, #MPLS and Ashley Dubose. We were able to feature an Artist Spotlight during an intermission in August due to a total of four rain cancellations throughout the summer. Maria Isa was the featured local poet, in August. Our second goal was to draw the Northside community together and to get them to engage with each other. We saw evidence of this through strong attendance, much like the last couple years. In 2014, we saw an average of 1300 attendees per concert and in 2015, we saw an average of about 1400 attendees at each of the three concerts. This year we had about the same attendance as last year. We were confident that we were going to have an even larger turnout than the previous years since we increased our marketing however, we were struck with a lot of rain which caused us to have to move performances to the assigned rain dates. We are proud that our event is remaining established as a premiere community gathering. After asking many attendees if this was their first Live on the Drive Concert event, one out of every four said it was their first time and that they heard about it previous years from a neighbor or friend. The majority of the attendees lived in 55412 and 55411 North Minneapolis zip codes, and many came from Robbinsdale, whose borders rests on the adjacent side of Victory Memorial Drive. We feel that we were successful in reaching an audience that reflected the diversity of residents in north Minneapolis, but did not actually reach our ambitious numbers for audience turn out. As noted above, over 75% of our audience came from the direct and adjacent zip codes and we also attracted residents from throughout the Twin Cities. The crowd at each concert was notably diverse in racial make-up and age, however we had no measure for socio-economic diversity. We believe our engagement has consistently reached our board and diverse audience and was accomplished this year through our marketing: yard signs, posters, word of mouth, mailings social media and newspaper ads. In the future I think we will make greater efforts at more targeted outreach to cultural groups. This year, two out of three performances featured artist groups of color. We felt very good about the access to all of our concert series. All concerts and planning meetings happened in ADA Accessible spaces. Our event is close to public transit and is completely free. We will be reaching out to local translators to further reach a larger audience through multi-lingual posters next year. We planned to implement that in 2016 however, it was one of those things that was unfortunately set on the back burner while searching for a new executive director.