Community Arts
ACHF Arts Access
We anticipate bringing art to over 8500 people in our community over the two day festival and engaging 800 plus of those attending in a hands on community art project where some will experience making art for the first time. We will provide an opportunity to 100 artists to show and sell their work at our venue. We will use a counter at the entrance to the festival, and at both activities tents (kids and art experience). We will provide surveys to all artists, vendors, and sponsors to gauge their experience and we will provide social media interaction for the audience.
Our goal was to bring the literary arts into the visual arts mix this year while continuing the engagement and quality of the artists and activities we offer annually. Our goal to have 100-104 qualified artists was achieved with our jury of 3-D and 2-D experienced judges. We had 120 applications and juried in 100 artists. We were able to bring in 12 authors who shared a tent over the two day festival on a rotating basis. The authors seemed pleased to be there, but if we continue with this in the future we will look at some training/advice on how to engage with our community audience as they were not very active in conversing with the audience coming by. Our community engagement projects went very well with children spending up to two hours in the Children's Art Tent creating their own books and telling a story. The community art project was equally well received with participants age 11 and up spending up to 2 hours on an illuminated letter project and story - 150 participated. Usually we have a large number of participants for this project, however, it was structured to be a deeper project - not a quick add and dash so that may explain the number variance. We will be discussing what the sweet spot is between deeper engagement vs. number of touches for the 2017 festival. Both are valuable. We had a couple of new bands in the Entertainment lineup and they were very well received. One was a 90's throwback band that we hoped would entertain and engage 20-30 somethings at our event and increase their participation. This worked very well and people loved them. We will be bringing them back for 2017 if they are available. The Youth in Art program continues to be a challenge to maintain. This year the change up was to bring elementary art onto the site to start a process of having kids participate at a younger level so that they will continue to be interested in participating as community members as they grow into young adulthood. Working with the schools to make this happen was challenging due to the fact the festival is held when school is out. Also because of the outdoor venue it was difficult to display the large number of pieces that were provided to the festival. We will be revisiting this part of the project for 2017 to find a better way to manage it. We successfully reached our intended community of people from the City of Eagan and surrounding area... Our attendance was down a little due to excessive heat on Saturday which was disappointing, but not unexpected. The festival is located on ADA accessible grounds, and one thing that was noticed is that there seemed to be more people in wheelchairs then in the past - so the asphalt path around the artists was very important along with the accessible bathroom facility. The number of different media among the artists increased slightly this year and several had multimedia applications - selection of artists will become more challenging if that trend in applications continues. The audience at the event by observation tends to be more middle aged and older people in the past, but this year there were many younger people and young families (strollers) then in the past so this will be kept in mind for 2017 as well. Marketing materials were deliberately left in all public buildings possible where many different people would be including the library, all city buildings, many area businesses and hotels. The festival markets to and opens the door as wide as possible to attract all people from this community. With 7000-8000 people on-site it would be wonderful to have a way to track cultural diversity more accurately and we would welcome any recommendations. Over the two days several different languages were heard including Hmong, Spanish, Pashtun, Russian and Ukrainian. It would be difficult to say how many cultures were represented among the attendees. The festival has continued to grow for several years by an average of 10% so in 2016 8500 people were expected. The number attending was just under 7300 - due mostly to a heat index of 107 degrees on the Saturday of the festival. There were 123 artists and sponsors on-site. 400 children created books and 150 ages 11 and up made Illuminated Letters. 85% of artists will be re-applying in 2017.
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