The Quest for the Fest’s I Stand For Fest: Something Else, Entirely

Why do people look at art? What draws them to shows? What do they want from an exhibit experience? Is it as simple as human connection? Is it to see what an artist has to say, or see what a hundred artists have to say, or see their own work in the context of others? Is it to experience fine objects, or finely pointed ideas? Is the goal of a show to support the artist, or to engage the audience?

The ongoing project known as the Quest for the Fest, and the resulting I Stand For Fest raise all these questions for viewers. I Stand For Fest debuted at SPACES in August, then moved to an upstairs room at the BrownHoist Building, and then to Ingenuity Fest the weekend of September 26 – 28. It has evolved at every stage. The show is not a body of work by a single artist, or even a group show in the traditional sense: it’s an “everybody-in” experiment in event building.  It’s not curated, so much as guided, or facilitated.

The origin story for I Stand For Fest is an important part of the show, as is the process by which it ultimately came to be. Just days after CAN’s Board of Directors (including Liz Maugans, who was then on CAN’s Board and remains an Emeritus board member) voted unanimously not to proceed with CAN Triennial in January 2024, and just days after the announcement that FRONT Triennial would not proceed, Maugans posted online about the need to create something new in the wake of those ambitious events. Artist David King jumped on board, and soon there were meetings and conversations about the nature of these big art events. If cost and the bandwidth of leadership were the challenges that took down those two triennials, how could a new festival be created without financial and leadership burdens? What would that look like?

Further: What do artists want from these events? Should they be paid? Should they be chosen somehow? Should the event somehow engage audiences beyond Cleveland, like in Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Columbus or Detroit?

Of course these questions have been asked and answered over and over. Artists have the urge to create, whether there are shows or not. But they want shows, they want audiences, and they want bigger audiences. They want to sell their work because they deserve to be paid, and they deserve to be paid more because they are constantly undervalued. Many of them want validation. They want to build their resumes to establish credibility, which builds value. And they know that Northeast Ohio, or The Land, or The 216, or whatever you want to call this region has a somewhat limited audience both in numbers and pocketbooks, and so they want to find audiences, curators and buyers in all those aforementioned cities, and perhaps even Chicago, and New York, and Los Angeles. We’ve talked about this, right?

Or is this something else entirely?

The Quest for the Fest group met monthly through 2024, and as Anastasia Pantsios quoted David King for a story at the end of that year, they were “building the plane as they flew it.” There’s no formal leadership structure, no checkbook, no curation. That is both the beauty and challenge of such an enterprise.

Rather than have a single leader or specific hierarchy, the Quest for the Fest evolved with a range of organizers working on different aspects, or taking up the charge for a period of time, including Maugans, King, and Gina Washington (who is also a member of CAN’s Board), Linda Zolten Wood, and Juan Quirarte, Tom Berger, Ross Bochnek, Steven Calhoun, and Natalie Isvarin Love, to name a few. A little over a year after those initial meetings, consensus formed around the idea of crowd-sourcing artistic works expressing what contributors care about.  It’s a concept for these fraught times,  when politics seems to be all about what is wrong with the other side, and when so much of the news is telling what threatens us—from Artificial Intelligence to housing costs, from fast fashion filling up landfills with plastic waste to wages that haven’t kept up with inflation, from multiple wars overseas to the current US Administration’s apparent war on some of its own people. Gina Washington coined the title, I Stand For Fest. Its antidote for the age was not protest, but instead celebration of what people stand for.

Pulling together a chorus of voices in response to an idea is a tried-and-true model for art of all kinds—from collecting stories around common experience, to responses to some circumstance, to photos of the 2024 Eclipse. And it’s a model Maugans has used before in exhibition building: the creation of an easy, accessible way for a lot of people to participate in a big group show via repetition of a simple idea, and an open invitation to be a part of it. At least 400 Cleveland artists probably remember The Artists’ Trust, Maugans’ contribution to Constant As The Sun, the 2017 regional exhibition featuring 10 artists at moCa Cleveland.  To create The Artists’ Trust, Maugans issued an open invitation to contribute 8.5 X 11-inch self-portraits. Some 400 artists responded. The result was an installation that filled a wall and was a highlight of the show, drawing crowds of visitors at the opening and spinning off into an online artist registry eventually managed by Gordon Square Arts District until that organization closed its doors.

Under the I Stand For Fest umbrella, Maugans spearheaded the Preserving Cultures installation. Natalie Isvarin-Love coordinated a Community Quilt. Thomas Smith built a model of the first house he lived in as a child. In each of those cases, the community was invited to participate by lending their words, drawings, and assemblage.

The appeal in these installations is the idea that a crowd of people have become a part of something. Examples of things artists stood for in Maugans’ Preserving Cultures installation –via the contents of their jars–include love, peace, true love, and one love (represented by a jar full of candy valentine hearts); Girl Power (spelled POWR, in a Peter Max rainbow of color, with the jar sprouting pony tails and muscular arms, and radiating more vibrant color); Trees, the freedom to soar, equality, safety and healing, medicine (represented with bandage, a red cross, and a syringe, among other symbols), and scores of other ideas.  Even if the community participation is the point, looking at them one-by-one is a much better way to experience the show than to just glance at the whole. The overview shows you what the exhibit is, but its value is revealed in the individual contributions.  Organizer Stormy Sweitzer reports that 66 artists contributed 42 – 2D jars drawn or painted on paper, and 33 – actual jars filled with symbolic objects. Contributors included Amy Casey, Brian Asquith, Ed Raffel, Douglas Max Utter, Lori Kella, Michael Loderstedt, and dozens of other artists, some very familiar, others less so. Maugans says in addition she recruited three community groups–from the Malachi Center, the North Collinwood Senior Center, and the Lakeside Assisted Living Center at the Normandy—which added approximately 60 more.

In a separate but same-spirited project, Natalie Isvarin-Love invited participants to contribute to her Community Quilt by coloring their ideas onto squares of fabric, which yielded a similar patchwork of love, hope, and kindness. In addition to “Healing through Art,” “Kindness, Peace, Justice, and Empathy,” “Free Speech,” “DEI” (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), and “Authenticity,” one could find nuggets such as “Keep Writing Cursive” and “Pickleball Forever.”  In the typical art world, quilts are about expressive or eye-popping patterns, geometry, the source of fabrics, hand stitching vs machine stitching, and other concerns. This was not that.  But it did certainly pull together community, which is another aspect of quilt making. Isvarin-Love says she didn’t keep a list of participants, but Sweitzer reports that approximately 70 people contributed 80 blocks, so far.

Thomas Smith’s contribution was to create a model of his first childhood home—a place in which he was not able to live very long, but where he did find a piece of himself, as he said in the didactic. It’s a substantial cardboard replica, measuring perhaps four feet wide, two feet deep and two feet high, with a peaked roof and gables above a porch and garage. Smith invited visitors to “write, draw, and share what [their] community looks like, to let their marks overlap and intertwine … showing that no community exists in isolation.” The house is loosely covered with child-like drawings of cats, Santa Claus (or something like him), stick figures, a dove in flight, stars, a hammer and sickle, and text with messages like “I Love You” and “Cat House.”

There were a variety of other activities in different iterations of the Fest, from musical performances to portrait drawing sessions.

There’s a practice in community theatre, which involves big casts drawing big audiences. Is there a street scene with passers-by? A Great opportunity for dozens of extras who only have to walk across the stage—and each of them have friends and relatives who will buy tickets to see them do it. Town meeting? Excellent, fill the room with extras. Considered cynically, that is a strategy for selling a lot of tickets. But that is missing the point. Neither community theatre nor community-building exhibitions like I Stand For Fest are about selling tickets, or in this case selling art. It’s about building the participatory experience. It’s partly community-engaged social practice, partly data gathering, and partly something like a quilting bee.

Will the I Stand For Fest continue its journey with installation in other venues? Will the Quest for the Fest continue its journey, seeking to fill the need of artists to draw curatorial and market attention from beyond their immediate circle of influence?  Can it do so while keeping with its ideal of grass-roots, consensus-based organization without hierarchy or corporate status? All that remains to be seen. There’s no way around the fact that I Stand For Fest is not an answer to the loss of the CAN Triennial or the FRONT Triennial. But those events were a starting point that led the participants somewhere else entirely.

The series of I Stand For Fest installations will have its third incarnation at Ingenuity Fest the weekend of September 26 – 28 at Ingenuity Fest, 5401 Hamilton Avenue, Cleveland.