Breaking - Festival of the Arts Over After 55 Years

I did not see this coming.

One of the funny things about life is that when you do something for the last time, you often don’t realize that it’s for the last time. Here is one of those times - The Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts has announced that it is ending operations immediately. No Festival, 2025.

Here’s Bill at Festival of the Arts in 2014. He usually emceed a few stages at the Festival each year.

The event was such a mainstay of our community that we referred to it as “Festival.”

Here’s the announcement that the festival won’t return in 2025.

The announcement doesn’t give a reason.

I performed at Festival with a children’s choir when I was 10. It seemed like every dance troup, singing group and the like took to the stage, while the parents watched, and then we milled about looking for the best food stand. It was somewhere positive to go, and something positive to do. In the last several years, Dad asked me to join him in emceeing a few times, but I never took him up on it. (I do not share his comfort in the spotlight.)

Questions that come to mind - Has the festival recently lost any funding sources? Were there any recent uncertainties in funding sources that played into this decision?

So I’m trying to see what I can find online about Festival financial health and funding sources. Here is a source saying that a small amount of funding came from a Kent County lodging tax. Here’s an article about the former executive director resigning for health reasons, but that doesn’t appear to be related, unless they got lost without their leadership.

Festival was canceled in 2020 and 2021 because of COVID.

I was able to screenshot this sponsorship list that was still up on the festival’s website (no longer linked from the main page).

This source looks like Festival of the Arts made two funding requests to the Michigan Arts & Culture Council for 2024 for a total of $63,758 that were not granted. Another document seems to corroborate. There did appear to be a grant in 2023.

You also have to look at who might be funding these funding sources. Some of these major sponsors are private companies, but many are not. Even for-profit companies can receive business support grants.

For example, the Michigan Arts & Culture Council (MACC) is funded, at least in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts. (Yours truly interned for the National Endowment for the Humanities when I was in college, under the George W. Bush administration, in the Old Post Office building, which became a Trump hotel. I think it’s now a Hilton. The office where my intern desk was - I couldn’t afford to rent it for the night now. But I degress.)

So the NEA funds MACC, which funds Festival of the Arts. You fund the NEA with your tax dollars.

This is such an interesting conversation we’ve had these last couple of weeks in the United States. What should be federal government funded? What shouldn’t be? Who wins? Who loses? What is worth saving with a government subsidy?

To be fair, we don’t know the extent to which funding played a role in Festival’s end, if any. And if funding did play a role, if it was related to the executive branch audits that are ongoing on a federal level.

Every year, at New Year’s, our family celebrates Festivus, For the Rest of Us. With out Festival, it’s all we have left.

What do you think? Did you attend Festival? What are your favorite memories?