After a year working to reduce operation costs, restructure its internal framework and “reexamine who we are as an organization,” the fire is beginning to rekindle at Ix Art Park.
Around this time last fall, the nonprofit creative space and immersive art experience just a couple blocks away from downtown Charlottesville was forced to trim back some of its services. Not only that, all of the Ix staff, with the exception of its newly installed executive director, was laid off, citing the economic fallout of the pandemic and expenses that “had gotten too massive for the income it was bringing in.”
Fast-forward to Sept. 21: The park celebrated both its 10th anniversary with a Lovefest and the launch of PhoenIX: Rising Together, a fundraising campaign with the ambitious goal of raising $10,000 by the end of the year.
Should it succeed, it will be the “the first time in a long time” the nonprofit foundation has met its annual fundraising goals, Executive Director Ewa Harr told The Daily Progress.
“It’s taken us a year to get back on our feet,” she said, “and stabilize to the point where we can look ahead and say, ‘OK, with continued community support we can continue, not only to do what we’ve been doing, but to do things better, to do more and to bring back some of the things we had to put on pause last year.’”
Some of those paused programs included free artmaking projects, Thursday night sunset markets and summertime camps and movie nights.
Instead, the Ix Arts Foundation decided to redirect its time and energy on four primary sources of revenue for the park: admissions to the popular Looking Glass immersive art exhibit; the festivals hosted on the wide, decorated blacktop behind the exhibit; the seasonal Farmers Market at Ix and other community partnerships as well as sponsorships, grants and donations.
The cutbacks and renewed focus seem to have paid off.
Roughly 2,000 people attended festivals at the park over the past year, including Cville Arts Fest, Soul of Cville and Fae Fest. The Looking Glass space also hosted a well-attended “Rainbow Disco,” the official after-party for Charlottesville Pride earlier in September. Harr said there have been wait lists for artists, performers and vendors hoping to get into many of those events. The free “Community Days” at the Looking Glass exhibit, thanks to the sponsorship of car dealership Flow Toyota, have seen roughly 500 pairs of feet walk through the space’s hidden, bookshelf-disguised door every month.
The agreement with Flow is set to expire at the end of November, but Harr is hopeful the foundation will be able to renew the partnership next year.
“We’ve been really successful,” she said. “We’ve almost met 100% of our anticipated board donations, sponsorship donations and corporate donations. Public donations are our last quadrant.”
With the charitable donations to the PhoenIX campaign, bringing in $600 last Monday afternoon, the foundation plans to fund a variety of projects at the park.
The park has created a scale of needs, identifying where to allocate the funds starting with financial gifts of $25 to $1,000 going toward general operations and large contributions helping to upgrade facilities to improve accessibility, community engagement and renovation projects. Contributions of $100,000 can be funneled to a named scholarship program to support “aspiring artists, fostering the growth of creativity and knowledge within the community.”
Given the outpouring of community support Ix received last fall when the foundation came forward to the public about its financial struggles, Harr is optimistic the PhoenIX campaign will be successful.
“Now we’ve gotten here, and we’re like, ‘OK, we’ve kind of figured out the things, the little hiccups or difficulties that we were having,’” she said, “Now when we ask for your support, we can use it in a way that is going to give back to the community and be meaningful to our organization and our patrons.”
Cutting a check on the park’s 10th anniversary wasn’t the only way park visitors showed their support for what Harr called a “vital, free third space for the community.” Many showed up for the third-ever Lovefest at Ix on the night of Sept. 21.
Orchestrated by park founder Brian Wimer, who runs the Charlottesville-based Amoeba Film production company, the first two iterations of Lovefest were thrown to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Monterey Pop music festival, recognized as inspiring the “Summer of Love,” and another for the Woodstock Rock Festival. This year, Wimer brought together a mix of musical artists, craft vendors, fire spinners and an aerial acrobats to show Ix’s gratitude “to the community that has supported us.”
“After 10 years, the notion with the art park originally, and I think still is, is that this isn’t one person’s work; this is everybody’s work,” he told The Daily Progress. “Because we wanted people to feel that art wasn’t something that other people do. Art’s something that we all do, so how do you contribute to it in a higher order?”
As for the future, Wimer said he is reaching back out to the artists, musicians and merrymakers who have played a role in the park’s existence to invite them back as Ix is “reinventing itself.”
Though what that may look like exactly remains to be seen.
“It’s part of that unanticipated and openness to possibility that has always been part of our ‘dream big,’ ‘anything is possible,’” Wimer said. “So there is one thing of looking forward and seeing how you’re going to make it sustainable and all that, but there’s also leaving that open door to who knows what could come in.
“And again, that’s contingent on the people who come down and experience this,” he added.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com