ARTx weekend kicked off on Thursday, May 25th with Ideas Night. The event was free and open to the public and gave an opportunity for our creative community to mingle ahead of the busy weekend. Thank you to Satchmo’s for catering the event and to the Orpheum for hosting!

Ideas night included a sneak peak performance of Blooming from the Ashes: Forrest Fire & Community Resilience. A highlight of the night was certainly the keynote by MacArthur Fellow and Peabody Award winning broadcaster Majora Carter. Her presentation, “Reclaiming Your Community” was insightful, fun, and thought-provoking. 

Friday and Saturday were busy, full of interactive and immersive art experiences. For this pilot event, fourteen projects were grant funded with support from the Beautification and Public Art Commission.  Below are just a few project highlights please visit the ARTx website here to learn more about each of the official ARTx projects.

Bryan David Griffith: Envision at the Nackard Gallery

Envision, a visual art installation, was featured at the temporary Nackard Gallery. The Nackard Gallery is an historic Nackard Pepsi warehouse transformed in partnership with the artist  into a gallery space. The gallery space is located off South San Francisco in downtown Flagstaff. In Envision, Griffith invited community members to materially contribute their dreams and concerns for Flagstaff’s future. In the center of the gallery, a cloud of thousands of aspen leaves rose from a shadow of charcoal and stone gathered from recent fire and flood sites. Envision was a stunning display which asked – will our community transcend these threats, adapt, and form new connections, just as aspens spring new shoots from their roots when a tree dies in a fire?

Pop Goes the Ferret: An Experimental Rock Opera In Progress

Based on the forthcoming book Backvalley Ferrets: A Rewilding of the Colorado Plateau by local author Lawrence Lenhart, Pop Goes the Ferret was a thirty-minute performance, in Theatrikos’ Black Box Theater, of short scenes that include songs, dialogue, multimedia, puppets, audience interaction, acting, and stagecraft. Performed twice during the weekend, each audience delighted in the absurd, comical, and educational performances. After the performance, Lenhart hosted a short Q&A with the audience about his book and process. Lenhart hopes to bring a full-scale rock opera to the 2024 ARTx Art + Ideas Festival. 

Tzonteyōtl Na’ach’ąąh (Resistance Art) A Diné & Xikan@ Collaboration

Tzonteyōtl Na’ach’ąąh (Resistance Art) A Diné & Xikan@ Collaboration closed out the weekend on Saturday night at Coconino Center for the Arts. This collaborative performance brought together spoken word, drag, dance, music, and visual projections in a cross cultural, Indigenous, intergenerational, collaboration of resistance art. Organized between Los Angeles based artist/activist Rubén Funkahuatl Guevara, and local Diné artist/anarchist Klee Jones Benally, the project consisted of approximately 90-minute performance art pieces connecting Diné and Xican@ cultures and offered an unraveling of histories through shared re-imaginings which celebrated the art of Indigenous resistance against the gendered violence of colonialism.

To learn more about the other projects, please visit the ARTx website here which will be updated with highlight videos from each project soon, as well as follow along on social media for information about the 2024 event!