Art Has Power

Where will your project take place?

Rogers City, MI

Briefly Describe Your Project Idea:

A Poetry Festival & Art Walk to activate the empty business spaces in our downtown area with art & poetry. Installations will cover the empty windows and we will create traveling poetry that leads people from one end of 3rd street to the other. Partners are the library and the Stone House Studio.

Why does your community need this project?

We are a rural community including young families, retirees, young professionals who work remotely, farmers, blue collar workers, and service industry workers. The population in Rogers City has changed over the years including many new people who have moved into the area. These new residents often want the kinds of arts and cultural opportunities that they had in the larger cities and communities they came from. In addition, our long-time local residents have always valued the opportunity to come together for arts and cultural events. Art and poetry crosses boundaries and bridges divides in our community.

What do you hope to achieve through this project?

Our community has a long history of arts and culture. Beginning in the early 1900s this community has had movie theatres that showed film and vaudeville performances. Many artists have made this area their home from writers, to visual artists, to performing artists and filmmakers. Poetry is a medium that brings those arts together. A poetry slam is a performing art. A poem and image can be made more powerful by pairing them together. And poetry has a unique way of crossing generational and cultural boundaries in a community. As a northern town with snowy winters, we have a large population of readers, and our love of books and culture brings our town together. We want to create a new way to do that. We have empty business spaces in our downtown area that will be activated with art and poetry. In addition, we are lucky to have an active group of amateur photographers who post on Facebook, in “I Love Rogers City”. We want to leverage that population of artist posters and followers to find and select the art that we will pair with poetry to fill these empty spaces. We will create installations to cover the windows with poems and artwork that will draw people in and get our community talking. In addition, because of these empty spaces, during downtown events there are gaps in activity and these installations will create places of interest that will lead community members from one end of the street to the other, rather than losing them in a “dead” zone. We also want to create smaller poetry signs that can be placed one after the other through the downtown as “traveling poetry”. For our art walk in the fall, the activation of these storefronts, and the signs of traveling poetry will provide intrigue and lead attendees to the next location, from one end of main street to the other.