Rest up for Foo Fest! For twelve hours on Saturday, August 11th, listen to live music on indoor and outdoor stages on Empire Street! Tickets are just $7 for the festival, which runs from 1 PM to 1 AM and also features interactive art installations, kids’ activities, and delicious eats from AS220 Foo(d), The Bar at AS220, Julian’s and Like No Udder.
Two dozen musical acts will perform, with Big Freedia and The Divas headlining. Big Freedia is the undisputed “Queen Diva” of Bounce Music, an original urban music genre rising up from the challenging yet fun-loving nature of the New Orleans housing projects which dominate the city’s street culture.
Other musical acts include AS220 Youth Zuology, Boo City, Dead Air, Dirty Durdie with DJ Kellan & D-Napp, Humanbeast, Meager Sunlight, Ravi Shavi, Sandworm, Songs, Symmetry, The Famous Winters, The Sugar Honey Iced Tea and Trip Dicks. You can also check out performances and installations by the Strange Attractor Theatre Co.; comedy by Randy Bush, Tim Vargulish, Jenny Zigrino & Rob Crean; China Blue (with Firefly Projects); Tom West & The Providence Artist Campaign Candidates; and printmaker Dennis Mcnett (Wolfbat Studios), AS220’s Visiting Artist-in-Residence.
2012 Free Culture Award Honorees Joan Wyand and Guillermo Gomez Pena will accept their awards on the main stage at the festival. Wyand will install a fabric-based piece called ‘Hurray for Foo Thousand Twelve,’ a quilted shade mural with ceramic elements in the second story windows of 95 Empire, while Gomez Pena just completed a large scale black-and-white mural on the back of AS220’s 95-115 Empire Street complex. (Read the complete text here). Together, they will release their collaborative artifact, the Nostagia box, which includes a series of 10 full color screen print figures portraying radical personas and a corresponding set of postcards that highlight moments from their performance histories.
The Free Culture Award is given every two years to artists whose work has made a significant contribution to grassroots, participatory culture and freedom of expression, and whose art and/or process embodies AS220’s unjuried, uncensored mission. Shepard Fairey, who designed AS220’s first Downcity mural on the northwest side of the Pell Chafee Performance Center, received the first award in 2010.
For more information, visit as220.org.