A longtime Grand Rapids summer tradition is ending, as local artists wonder what's next

To people who didn’t grow up in Grand Rapids, it can be a little hard to explain what made the Festival of the Arts so important to the city for so long.

Sure, it was a big event downtown, but every city has big events downtown in the summer these days.

For longtime Grand Rapidians though, the Festival of the Arts was in a different category. The centrality of it was apparent in the name most used in conversation. To locals, it wasn’t the “Festival of the Arts.” It was simply “Festival.”

As if no other festival even existed. Which, at the beginning, was kind of true in Grand Rapids.

“I’ve been going down there since as early as I can remember,” said Greg Wells, who is now the band director at Northview High School, just outside the city limits. “Going down there and seeing the food booths and the dancers and the art and all the other stuff going on. And doing the chalk drawings on the sidewalk and face-painting and all that stuff.”

Wells says he’s heard from the old Northview band director that the school has had a band at Festival every year since the beginning of the event in 1970. Wells himself performed as a student at Northview. As a teacher, he taken his students every year (except for when Festival was canceled because of COVID-19.

Wells has also performed countless times in his own bands.

And this is the thing about Festival - what made it so special. For local artists, it was the place to get seen.

For musicians in particular, Festival might be one of the first places where they got a gig.

“For some groups, it was like the culminating thing that they would go to,” Wells said. “Because a lot of these community groups or school groups or small things might be bar musicians that play at a little bar and, you know, they've got their regulars that might show up. But then to play here, you have literally an assortment of all walks of people coming to listen to you and hear you. And so it was a big thing for a lot of them just to get seen and be heard and get their name out.”

Dustin Dwyer

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Michigan Public

That was the whole idea behind Festival from the beginning.

Gina Bivins is a longtime volunteer, and onetime chairperson of the event. She says she missed the very first Festival because she was in the hospital having her first child. But after that, she never missed it again.

“Not one,” she said.

For her, growing up in Grand Rapids, there were no big community-wide events downtown. Festival really was the first.

She says what longtime Grand Rapids folks knew about Festival - and what newcomers might have missed - is that, even as it grew, Festival always kept its focus on local talent. For some school kids she said, the Festival of the Arts might be the first time they got to see their artwork hanging up on a wall somewhere other than at school or the kitchen fridge.

“We were showcasing those that were here,” Bivins said. “And I think that’s kind of unique where others would expand further and further out, we held on to that belief that these artists deserve to be seen.”

But Grand Rapids has changed a lot since 1970, and there are a lot more downtown events now, which may be part of why Festival couldn’t draw as big of a crowd, or get as many volunteers as in years past.

“Grand Rapids is an artsy community. Quote-unquote, artsy. But it's due to more than simply Festival or ArtPrize,” said Steff Rosalez, who leads the Grandville Avenue Arts & Humanities, and co-chairs the Arts & Culture Collective of Grand Rapids.

To her, losing Festival is a bummer, but she says the arts community in Grand Rapids these days is a lot broader.

There are more than 45 different arts organizations in the city, Rosalez says. The Arts & Culture Collective just released an economic impact study that found that the arts add nearly $300 million dollars to the local economy and support 2,500 jobs in Kent County.

Still, Rosalez says she is deeply concerned about the arts in the city.

“You know, Festival isn’t the first arts institution to go away over the past few years,” Rosalez said. “It’s a reminder that if we don’t start creating public support for these institutions that matter a lot to us, they’re not just going to continue existing.”

Artists, Rosalez said, will figure out a way to keep creating. But there’s no guarantee they’ll stay and figure it out in Grand Rapids.

Unless some new support comes along to make it happen.

Kind of like what Festival did all those years ago.