Starting Saturday. October 4, Mesa Arts Center will host MACfest, a weekly open-air market with food, music, and artwork for sale by local artists from Mesa and beyond. Think a combination of a farmers’ market combined with Phoenix’s First Fridays, and you can see that this will brighten up the Eastside art scene, and open up an instant al fresco gallery lane more apt to be seen in exotic locales like Chichicastenengo, Guatemala or on the streets of the island of Lamu off the coast of Kenya than in our own local desert. Perhaps this is not a coincidence, as MACfest was proposed by Johann Zietsman, Executive Director of the Mesa Arts Center, and the Arts and Cultural Director for the City of Mesa.
Zietsman was raised in South Africa, where he picked up a degree in architecture before pursuing his master’s in music at Ithaca College in New York with a specialty in French horn, conducting and arts administration. On returning to South Africa, he started three music schools in Cape Town, was the director of the KwaZulu Natal Philharmonic Orchestra, the CEO of The Playhouse Company in Durban SA, amongst many other endeavors during the collapse of apartheid in his homeland. Zietsman enjoyed his college years in the States, and began residency here in 2002. He was drafted recently from his position running the International Society of Performing Arts to lead the City of Mesa’s arts and cultural institutions. During his time in Durban during the tumultous re-birthing his country, he began an arts market project that became the inspiration for MACfest. We asked Zietsman to explain why he was starting this new arts market:
“Over the last ten years the population of Mesa has doubled. Many peoples from different places with diverse cultures now live here. Mesa Arts Center was formed so that those communities will become one community through the arts. This is a bold vision of society that has been articulated, it is about how a society sees its future…I cannot divorce myself from that, it is how I grew up and how I see what must be and should be. The arts cannot only be for the most talented or an elite, but for everyone.”
Call to Artists: Exhibition spaces are $15 per week and are available through the Mesa Arts Center Box Office at 480-644-6500 on a first come first serve basis. Spaces are going quickly with 41 sold in the first week. Artists can acquire their City of Mesa tax license for $50 by visiting http://www.cityofmesa.org/salestax/pdf/MACFest.pdf or calling Karen Rounsborg at 480-644-3359. Artists will need proof of the Mesa City Sales Tax number to initially sign up at the Mesa Arts Center Box Office. For MACFest tips and guidelines and to get on the MACFest e-mail list contact Sharon Sieben at ssiebenart@cox.net. For event logistics contact Courtney Tjaden at 480-644-6627 or courtney.tjaden@cityofmesa.org.
MACFest occurs every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Oct.-May on Main Street from Sirrine to Morris in downtown Mesa.
|
review.gif){kind=small}
