Visitors enjoy artists, performers and activities at Remix/Remaster Event celebrating Mesa Arts Center Season Kickoff.
Updates
The 21st Century Café Society project is building momentum. We are very excited to have hired a Project Coordinator to facilitate communication among team members as the project continues to expand and include community members and local students.
Last week, we presented information about the 21st Century Café Society to potential iProject students at the Arizona State University Polytechnic campus, also located in Mesa. This presentation generated enthusiastic interest from both undergraduate and graduate students in the College of Technology and Innovation. We are particularly excited about the graduate students studying computer software, several of whom were tremendously excited about the project and its potential impact. Having them join our team will be helpful as we select and/or develop interfaces and software.
In addition to the iProject team, we have a number of faculty liaisons who have recruited individual students and entire classes to assist with the creation of the project. Currently, there are two engineering classes that will help to design the interactive elements, including café table interfaces, the community bulletin board, and photo kiosk. Members of the iProject Team come from a variety of majors, including Engineering and the Department of Human & Environmental Systems. These students will be involved heavily in community research and engagement, as well as creating design solutions concerning the plaza features, the ambiance, and the way the design meet both expressed and discovered needs and desires. We are thrilled to involve so many creative minds to help foster the community engagement that our project promotes.
We are also excited by the progress made on the Center Street light rail station construction. As the summer comes to a close—and with temperatures still at and over 100 degrees, you would never know it—the downtown light rail construction will go on hiatus. This will provide a much-needed reprieve from the drilling and associated construction noise, especially as our production season gets underway. The light rail extension is slated to be complete in two years, but the process may be accelerated, and we may see the light rail stopping in front of 21st Century Café Society sooner than we anticipated.
Recent Wins
Last night was our Remix/Remaster 2013 Fall Season Kick-Off for the Mesa Arts Center. About 5,000 community members participated in a nighttime street festival filled with performances, music, artist demonstrations, and a photo booth; this was accompanied by the opening of all new exhibitions in the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum. (This was also the evening of Second Fridays in Downtown Mesa on Main Street.) We were gratified to see so many Mesa residents join us to celebrate the vibrancy of our downtown arts community. This event marked the inauguration of our new Alliance Pavilion Stage, the first project in Phase I of 21st Century Café Society. Metal sculptors used the Alliance Pavilion Stage as a demonstration location, and our patrons enjoyed watching them work and learning more about their techniques. There are several elements still to go in at the Alliance Pavilion: the bright orange glass backsplash and the waterfall feature are not yet in place, although they should be completed in about three weeks. The shade sails that match the look of the signature sails at Mesa Arts Center (and provide much-needed shade) are a long lead-time item and will be installed mid-November.
For Remix/Remaster, the plaza and Shadow Walk were activated by all kinds of fun activities—live portrait painting, a giant mural spray painted on site, a live band playing Latin music, and a DJ providing the beats, to name a few. Founding Resident Companies performed, and there were opportunities for visitors to put themselves into the paintings for fun photographs, and ASU Digital Culture students created building projections mapped to Mesa Arts Center’s buildings. The new exhibitions at MCA were absolutely terrific (anyone in or coming to AZ—come check them out—MCA admission is always free!). Just down the street at the Arizona Museum of Natural History, we co-sponsored a college mixer and museum takeover for local university students. There are several new satellite college campuses in Mesa and we continue to nurture our growing partnership with ASUPoly, and this was wonderful to welcome students to the Kickoff and to explore the Natural History museums. They enjoyed the beautiful rooftop terrace and really liked visiting with the dinos!
Our community has begun to truly envision the types of engagement the 21st Century Café Society will foster. People keep talking about how excited they are both at the prospect of the new space and opportunities to be a part of the process.
Insights/Provocation
Creative placemaking and community arts engagement are becoming ever more important. I think people are yearning for it. And our communities need the sense of place and community it engenders. We surveyed visitors at last night’s event, and while I don’t have the results yet, comments from two intercept survey takers were almost identical: people loved it, and they loved that they can always depend on events like this at MAC to be fun and engaging. This is obviously gratifying, but more important, it lays the groundwork for our Café Society project, enabling us to build on and benefit from positive expectations about experiences at MAC and, ultimately, in downtown Mesa.