It's Your Business: Granfalloon was artful collaboration of Indiana University, city
If you’re walking on downtown Kirkwood Avenue in the next week or so, chances are you’ll find pieces of robot-shaped confetti peppering the streets and trees — these are ephemera of The Flaming Lips’s mesmerizing headlining performance at this year’s Granfalloon Festival.
Presented by the Indiana University Arts and Humanities Council and inspired by legendary Hoosier author Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Granfallon’s full week of artistic events culminated last Saturday with a string of activities that spanned the length of Kirkwood Avenue from Washington to Indiana streets. The Handmade Market featured work for sale by local and regional artists; Girls Rock Bloomington celebrated our talented next generation of artists who performed music, poetry and skits. The Hudsucker Posse performed a circus act featuring physics-defying fire dancers, and crowds were invited to experience IU Eskenazi School of Art and Design Professor Dorian Bybee’s "FLTING” installation in Peoples Park meant to provoke the historical Black Market that once sat in that location.
Granfallon’s mainstage featured concerts by the up-and-coming group MICHELLE, and to top it all off, The Flaming Lips. The crowd, which spanned all the way down to Lincoln, was buzzing as the Lips played their classics and a fantastic cover of Madonna’s “Borderline.” Giant pink robots were inflated on stage, there were strobing lights, there were balls tossed into the audience for play; and of course, there was plenty of confetti. The sound and visuals of the performance lit up Kirkwood Avenue and its crowd with an inspiring energy.
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Granfalloon was a true embodiment of successful public art — it brought together local and national artists to produce a suite of activities and experiences that inspired a sense of joy that everyone in the audience shared (not to mention the extra dollars it brought businesses in the area). It created a strong sense of connection among our community.
It also demonstrated how strong the connection between Indiana University and the city of Bloomington can be. While IU’s Arts and Humanities Council brought the vision for the Kirkwood Street celebration, the city provided much of the infrastructure to support the day’s safe and smooth realization. It was a true town-gown collaboration that powered the event — the Arts and Humanities team worked with Bloomington’s fire, police and public works departments to designate appropriate street closures and identify the proper thoroughfares to keep open and accessible in the case that emergency vehicles were needed during the festival. They also worked with parking and fire to place barricades along Kirkwood to keep festival attendees safe from vehicular traffic. They worked with the city’s Public Works Department to produce an adequate plan for waste and traffic flow. City staff worked to keep things smooth throughout the event, and I'm pretty sure they enjoyed a few blasts of confetti, too.
The collaborative lift that pulled off this year's Granfalloon and the joy and delight it brought our community was a heavy one. I’ll never forget my first meeting about bringing the festival to Kirkwood. I stood on the corner of Kirkwood and Washington with representatives of IU, public works, and Economic and Sustainable Development and thought, how the heck are we going to pull this off?
Since that meeting, I have been overwhelmed by the city of Bloomington staff's ability to take a vision that sounds impossible and make it real. This year's Granfalloon success is a demonstration of what amazing and inspiring outcomes we can pull off when we work together and complement each others’ wild visions with prowess and know-how to protect and sustain a community. Together, we have made this inspired and inspiring community. And that itself is a piece of art.
Holly Warren is assistant director for the arts for Bloomington's Department of Economic and Sustainable Development.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Indiana University, Bloomington succeed with Granfalloon events
