Arts on the Flyway Grounded for 2018
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Klamath Falls – The committee responsible for planning Arts on the Flyway regrets to announce that the 2018 downtown art and music festival scheduled to take place on September 22, 2018 in Veteran’s Park will be cancelled due to lack of resources, most notably, volunteer manpower. This would have been the Festival’s third year as a Fall, downtown event.
Arts on the Flyway canceled for 2018 due to lack of volunteers. (Arts on the Flyway, Facebook)
Advertised as, “Where Arts and Music Take Flight” the festival has been successful, by all accounts, financially and in terms of bringing tourism and arts engagement (especially for children) to downtown. It is estimated the festival brought 4,000 people downtown to participate in Arts activities like a paint catapult, a collaborative community mural, rock painting and even Gyotaku (the Japanese art of painting fish and pressing them to paper to create vibrant prints). Attendees of the event were also able to engage with local culinary artists in food and drink tasting gardens and enjoy eleven different music and performing arts acts on three separate stages.
However, what started as a collaboration between 11 nonprofit and education agencies in 2015, dwindled to eight in 2016 and sits at only four this year.
“Sadly, the volunteer base we have this year for planning, and especially for executing, the event is just not capable of sustaining the scale and vision of the Festival.” says Lindsay Smith, chairperson for the event. “There are just so many moving parts; from managing vendors, to recruiting musicians and artists, jurying the artwork to ensure quality, setup and abiding by all the applicable ordinances and rules involved with that, finding sponsorships and donations… it’s a lot.”
“The Festival is essentially turn-key if another local organization wanted to take it on,” adds Janann Loetscher of the Favell Museum, who helped conceive of the Festival and has been part of the planning since the start, “We have all our beautiful signage, a fantastic website, merchandise and the basis for a lot of great community art projects. The event is even profitable; it would be fantastic for a group looking for a fundraising event.”
All registration fees paid by vendors and artists so far this year will be refunded. Anyone wishing to inquire about the cancellation or the event in general should email artsontheflyway@gmail.com.
Press release provided from Arts on the Flyway.