Cultural Arts District
Meeting Minutes
9/21/2005

• Dan Hintz gave a brief introduction of the Cultural Arts District Initiative and overview of the Fayetteville Arts Festival.
• Hintz invited impressions of this year’s festival and suggestions for next year. This year’s festival was the culmination of 8 months worth of feedback from the arts community. Next year can be even better when we incorporate what we learned this year.

www.fayettevillearts.org is a resource for the arts community. It offers an opportunity for you to post feedback. It is also a place to find information about arts activities in Fayetteville.

Some of the priorities of Fayetteville Downtown Partners include:
1.) Creation of an Arts Commisssion to advocate for the arts community.
2.) Expansion of Arts Festival
3.) Formation of Cultural Arts District with boundaries, services, incentives to
help the creative industries grow.

• Downtown Gallery ArtWalk. To provide administrative support for a major quarterly event within the Downtown Master Plan geographic scope.

• Public Art Policy. To bring art into the public forum to introduce art into everyday life. We have great examples like the Peace Fountain. We need
  more of this in Fayetteville.

• Arts in Education Roster. Creating opportunities for artists to teach their craft. Making sure that professional artists are able to continue to survive and thrive in our community.

The Fayetteville Arts Festival 2005 was made up of several different areas of programming.

Visual Arts

• Report from the Visual Arts Committee: We were trying to make a big change, and knowing that we want something different in the future. I feel that we made a great start. We got a great response from the artists. Our goal is for every year to get better and better. There were 32 artists. Total sales were over $21,000. The visual arts portion of the festival was the original part of the festival. We want it to be an important part in the future. It is a very high profile portion of the festival. One change/challenge was moving the whole show venue. The tents needed to be spaced a little bit more. The staging area needs to be better organized. We are very aware of a lot of the problems from this year and think that this will put us in a really good place to start planning next year.

Feedback from the public

• Shows that use visual artists as a draw are usually actually making their money from food vendors.
• FDP would love to see 200,000 visitors that are in town for the arts. The goal was to create a “maximum density” in the area to encourage patronage. The theory was the more people that come through the better. This may not be a viable theory, but we hoped that having foot traffic in the area of people that are interested in the arts it would encourage more sales activity.
• Question: Part of what we started talking about with the CADI is how do we build audiences for the arts? How do we broaden the pool of people that buy art?

The general population is just getting accustomed to buying art.

• Do you think splitting the visual arts from the rest of the programming would be a good thing? It makes sense to move it and it makes sense to keep them together.
• One of the biggest challenges of visual artists in Northwest Arkansas is battling the craft fair element. You need to distinguish that there is something different happening here. Fayetteville Arts Festival is different from Fayetteville Arts Festival.
• You should support the local artists over the people from other places.
• The attempt was to upgrade the show.
• The acceptance letter was a slap in the face. The wording was insulting. When you apply for a show, you know that you may or may not be accepted. There is a way to word this to make it less insulting.
• The bottom line is money. You need to have someone backing the festival financially so that you can provide large awards. You also need to get someone to back more focused advertising.
• Advertising of grocery store bags for the month before the festival.
• You can give local artists a handicap in the screening process.
• I think that moving the art booths from the Walton Arts Center away from the Walton Arts Center lawn into the street was a bad idea. I think that having the drunk-tank was a bad idea. It took away all of the work that had been done in the past to build this festival to what it was.
• I think that since there were so many changes this year, you should have sent a letter out to the past participants.
• If we really didn’t care, we wouldn’t be asking for you feedback now. We do care about your suggestions, and we do want to make it better.
• FDP will set up a meeting for October with anyone interested in the visual arts portion of the festival.
• Some shows have what they call an “art patron” program. They get companies to commit to spend a certain amount of money at the festival, and the booth where they spend their money is given an “art patron” award to put up in their booths. They could also do a pre-show where artists can bring art to display.

• I think you should have the art booths separate from the Arts Festival. You could have other Visual Arts elements during the overall festival. By having so much programming, you are not getting the same concentration of people who are interested in buying art.
• People who come to buy Fine Art are coming to buy art. The people that are coming to see programming might walk by, but are not going to be buying.

• You could also say that there is an education element. That people might not buy something this year, but they are exposed to the art and might buy next year.

Music

• Turnouts to library events were significantly better than events that occur throughout the year, so it is obvious that there was bounce from the publicity.
• There are areas for growth in utilizing the library as a venue.
• There was a great range of music programming from the stage events to the Mayor’s Concert.
• The stage should be a more prominent element.
• Mayor’s Concert: we had half of the auditorium full for a free concert. We should have had a lot more people there. We need to find better ways to market this concert.
• When you hand out free tickets, not everyone will be there. One solution would be to not give out blocks of tickets. One option would be to not do pre-sales.
• One area for improvement is finding ways to include as many genres and musical artists as possible.
• I’d like to find a better location for the stage.
• There were two NASO events at the Hog Haus which exceeded expectations.
• There are a lot of opportunities to flesh out the programming in these areas.

Theatre

• The rehearsal space should have had air-conditioning. That is something that could be better. Rehearsal space is definitely a great offering.
• The energy of seeing everyone in Fayetteville’s Theatre Community creating theatre was great. People left thinking that this is a theatre town. This was a great event.
• In scheduling the festival, you might find a time when there is a full theatrical production up (at the Walton Arts Center, University or TheatreSquared). It would be great to have more theatre events.
• The Fresh Theatre reading was also very well attended.

Dance

• We’d like to expand and provide a greater number of opportunities for dance offerings.
• We need to provide more appropriate staging for the dancers.
• Being outside was wonderful. It would be great if the mainstage was bigger and moved to a better location.
• It would be great to do dance as an installation at different locations through the week.

Film

• The idea of having the meeting with the Film Commissioner the night before was great.
• The idea of the workshop was great.
• It would be great to see a Q and A session. Maybe a meet and greet for filmmakers.
• There were 10 minute slots between films. That seems long. Maybe groupings of films would be good and then a Q and A session afterward.
• There could also be a mic at the front for people to introduce their films. The quality of films was high.
• Turnout could have been a little better. It was a long day. There was a lot going on. Maybe the scheduling could be a little bit different so that more artists could see more things.
• I think having a best of local prize would be great. There could also be categories for documentaries and narrative. Maybe sponsorships can be found for secondary prizes.

Date

• Biggest problem was the time of year. It was too hot.
• The Walton Arts Center wanted to coordinate the Arts Festival with their Open House which was pre-scheduled for the August Dates. There were a lot of programming opportunities that became available with that.
• There were also concerns about security having the festival being during a football weekend. We were also concerned about people being able to find lodging for people that would be coming into town.

Comment from Mayor Dan Coody: I want Fayetteville to be known for the arts. I want people to be coming to the city for the arts. Things do fall through the cracks during the first time out the shoot chute. We all have to work together to make the show better next year. Your input tonight is appreciated. There is room for improvement in every area. If we tighten up the things that didn’t go well and expand the things that did, we can move this thing forward. This festival is very important for Fayetteville. We are going to hit it out of the park next year.

General Feedback

• The reason that we were able to expand is because there was a structure in place that had been worked on.
• Advertising: The little posters did not seem practical to me. I would rather have seen one poster. The idea was to give some of the areas their own marketing.
• I thought the imagery for the marketing was great.
• I’d like to find a way to sell passes to the festival. This might help to expose people to things that they would not necessarily specifically buy a ticket for, but might go to if it were part of the pass.
• It might make more sense for there to be different dates for this festival and the visual arts festival.
• This could be a good solution, but it would be something that Fayetteville Downtown Partners would need to look into as far as producing and staffing, etc.
• It would be great for all of the events to be free, but obviously you would need greater sponsorships. Are sponsors interested in giving money because of the expansion.
• Advertising should be concentrated locally for the Arts Festival.
• Could the festival be expanded into a month long event so that people could really experience everything that there is to offer? Having everything together provides a synergy for marketing. Perhaps a month-long festival could be the goal, so that next year might still be a week-long event, but FDP could take on this as a long term goal.

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