Quest for the Fest Preliminary Vision (August 2024)

WHO WE ARE: Quest for the Fest is a small grassroots group of creative organizers aka Questers from NEOhio. Questers have been meeting in and around Cleveland since February 2024 to establish a new, unique event - one that’s entirely of their own making. Quest for the Fest is dedicated to presenting creative initiatives of all shapes and corners of Northeast Ohio.

WHAT WE DO: Quest for the Fest seeks to cultivate, promote, encourage, and develop public appreciation through a grassroots festival that supports creatives for the benefit, education, and enjoyment of the Northeast Ohio region, centering the activity in Cleveland and Akron.

VISION: Guided through the neighborhoods of Cleveland, The Fest celebrates engaged creative experiences in music, visual, and performing arts created for Cleveland by Cleveland creatives.

MISSION: The Fest is a community focused arts festival built by artists that celebrates Cleveland/NEO and its creatives through immersion, exhibition, and performance. The Fest works with local creatives to share their work, raise their profile within the creative community, and celebrate the dynamic creative environment that is Cleveland/NEO.

Micro-event 1: Collaboration with Ingenuity

Quest for the Fest has been busy as bees for the first collective event at IngenuityFest: Era of Ascent.

#1 'In the Making' is Quest for the Fest's Inaugural effort to celebrate what NEO is creating RIGHT NOW! Whether it's a work in progress, a sneak peek, or a spark of inspiration - if it's making you excited, we want to see it! Share your creativity with us by filling out the google form and let's show the community how we're all rising together!

A call to every creative in the Land far and wide, and only asks for a digital submission through a google form! Please send us a jpeg of your current project and we will be presenting them projected on a screen all together at this year's Era of Ascent themed Ingenuity Cleveland Festival for all to see! We secured two 42" monitors. One for IN THE MAKING loop and one for a short loop with Q4TF rhetoric and pictures of us meeting and working.

#2 The Co-creator League - Teams working together to create a collaborative piece with the Era of Ascent theme for this year's Ingenuity Festival. Questers will come together in groups of 3-4 people and create work together. We have three names already committed and can welcome up to 9 more creatives on this project! This concept is modeled off the incredible Cleveland Lottery League https://lottery-league.com

•  The Mountain of Ascent

•  Invasion Station Co-Creation Butterfly vs. The

Spotted Lanternfly.

A "hands-on" table will be at the Q4TF area for making their own butterflies or spotted lanternflies toadd to the specimen wall.

Micro-event 2: Wonder Quest #1

Initial Framing of Event: October 2024 In the lead up to the Quest for the Fest, the group has decided to hold a series of micro-events designed to increase engagement and build awareness for the Quest. Our first event was a successful hands-on Quest for the Fest installation as part of IngenuityFest in September.

The next planned event is scheduled for January 25th at the Brown Hoist Building. This event is designed to bring together Cleveland's diverse creative community and explore opportunities for collaboration through an interesting immersive experience. And we need your help to make this event a success!

While the focus of the experience is still being developed, the goals of the January event are to:

•  Foster cross-disciplinary connections among Cleveland creatives

•  Inspire wonder and disrupt conventional thinking about creative gatherings

•  Encourage innovative thinking about art and creativity in our city

•  Gather ideas and feedback to shape our main festival.
  
  Key Outcomes

Wonder Quest #1: Roots of Creativity -- an evening of imagination, origin stories, creative cross-pollination through the exploration of emotions identities artifacts and the roots of who we are creatively, and plenty of reflection, socializing and dancing! It was a grand experiment, and I think we are all excited by the possibility of what next!

4 month planning process; template for future events

Collaborative event design across 21 volunteers; organic contribution 94 people in attendance

Micro-event #3 I Stand For_______ (2025) Ingenuity Fest / The Brownhoist / SPACES

This project turned into a movable feast with the SPACES iteration in Hingetown preceded by moments in mid-town, at Ingenuity Fest and The Brownhoise. The originating concept was: what positive value,or principle, or ethic do you stand for? Firmly in open access, experiential learning mode, and feeling the dark pressure of our time, The Quest embraced a concept rooted to a positive and enlightening possibility: how might our community of creatives show us what the stand for?

The Quest provided a number of opportunities to articulate and make these stands legible and public. The stands were able to be integrated into diorama or small installations in glass jars; could become squares in quilts; could be shown in drawings, paintings, mixed media. Several installation artists, a flower farmer, a beekeeper, an instrument maker, various musicians, video artists, and experiential facilitators met the Quest's call to vibrate SPACES.

Ingenuity Fest introduced The Quest to Naomi Lord, a socially engaged installation artist from the UK. Our alignment with her ambitious vision for taking over a large space at Ingenuity Fest's Forging the Future, allowed us to offer a contribution to her wonderful A Paradise of Displacement. Naomi described her interactive artwork as "part immersive installation, part memory bank, part collective daydream. I Stand For____ fit into the public flow of the crowds who came into our spacious room to contribute to the quilts, draw and crayon, and, have their portraits drawn on the spot by volunteers from The Pretensious Cleveland Portrait Artists.

Liz Maugans notes the alignment:

A Paradise of Displacement is the second phase of Naomi’s research in Cleveland, following an initial stage of situated observation and conversations with a wide range of artists, arts organisations and creative practitioners in the city. This second phase takes the form of a participatory installation—a big, messy, playful community conversation around themes that emerged in that first phase. Here, art is understood as both process and research: the ideas and experiences shared within the installation will seed the next phase of dialogue, broadening and deepening the invitation to take part in shaping community-powered cultural activity.

The Cleveland Art Game (2026)

The genesis of the current project literally popped up at the end of an informal debrief at a cafe in Cleveland Heights. Stephen Calhoun wondered out loud, "What if. . .we created a game about creativity that anyone could join?" This was his inchoate intuition, a nascent Bingo! (Light bulb?) The Quest is configured to grab such balloons and run with them!