FEAST MPLS

Standing and talking with Jay Gabler and Sheila Regan of TC Daily Planet at the Pezzettino house party last night, Jay proposed something of a quantum theory to explain the behavior of arts in the Twin Cities- the wide range of artists with imagination plus the variety of performance spaces available multiplied by willing collaborators is only limited by the fact that there is no money to be made at it. So that group of artists sloughs off to greener pastures of corporate gigs and a new crop is ready and waiting to continue the cycle, which is only logical, considering that mathematically, n/0=infinity. So unless something changes, we could all stand here forever being artistic and broke.

A new organization, FEAST MPLS, is stepping in to buck that trend, or at least offer another model of collaborative funding. “FEAST” is an acronym for Funding Emerging Arts with Sustainable Tactics and is appropriate, because their tactics involve food. It’s the basic rent party model that musicians have been using forever and is a community, event driven, democratic way for artists to fund their projects. It’s a pretty simple formula- artists submit proposals that are all nicely typed up, people come to a dinner and put some money in the hat, the proposals are presented, a vote amongst diners is taken and the artist whose proposal gets the most votes walks out with a laundry bag of cash (not really, but they get the proceeds of the evening).

In the absence of large scale artist support programs and government grants, it’s the kind of DIY arts support that Republicans, communists and your mother can get behind. The first FEAST is on Saturday, November 14 at the Traffic Zone Center for Visual Art and artist proposals are due October 29th, so get yer butt in gear and apply here. In the spirit of collaboration, they are looking volunteers to help the day of, so e-mail feastmpls@gmail.com if you are interested in that, and you can follow them on Twitter @FEASTmpls. Since it is a show of numbers, if you are an artist hoping to get the grant money, it is good to turn your friends out to stuff the ballot box; so this could get really interesting, let’s hope it does.