It’s Friday, and the artists come out to play. Live painting and dancing, projected animations on walls, food, and murals mingle with the sounds of music and chatter. The scene is a familiar one from First Fridays art walks in Phoenix.
But instead of describing First Friday in Phoenix, it’s describing Last Fridays on the other side of the world in Pristina, Kosovo.
The University of Pristina’s Faculty of Arts graphic design department launched the city’s first Last Fridays, or E Premtja e Fundit, on March 29 to emulate the popular First Fridays event in downtown Phoenix. Greg Esser, co-founder of Roosevelt Row Community Development Corporation, became the link that brought the cultural phenomenon of First Fridays from the Southwestern United States to Eastern Europe. Esser said the task wasn’t too difficult, because the event is highly adaptable.
“First Fridays is an exportable idea that doesn’t depend on any one individual personality,” Esser said.
Of course, it did need a driven initiator, and this is where Alban Nimani came in. A University of Pristina digital media faculty member, Nimani visited Phoenix as part of the U.S. State Department’s Junior Faculty Development Program. Here, Nimani met visiting artists involved in the ASU Art Museum International Artist Residency at Combine Studios. Residency participants Matteo Rubbi, from Italy, and Beatrice Bailet, from France, were hosting a First Fridays workshop on creating masks for kids when Nimani met them.
“I was amazed by this event and how so many artists were performing or exhibiting on the street in downtown Phoenix,” Nimani said via email.
Nimani then met Esser at an ASU Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts event, and once back in Pristina, wrote and received a grant from the U.S. Embassy to help make the concept he saw in a Phoenix a reality for Pristina.
Shortly after, Esser traveled to Pristina to help with this process. He gave a presentation to university students on First Fridays and helped organize their first event, Nimani said.
“I have a feeling that this project has a potential to become a very important event in our country,” Nimani said via email. Considering the country’s recent history, this importance will weigh on more than just the Pristina arts community.
When First Fridays began in Phoenix in 1994, Kosovo was still part of Yugoslavia and would not declare independence until 2008. Artlink Phoenix fostered what would become the largest monthly art walk in the United States, according to their website. At the same time, throughout the 1990s, Kosovo underwent major governmental changes and warfare, Esser said. This had a critical impact on the art scene at the time.
“Freedom of expression was fervently oppressed,” Esser said. “The majority of the work was Soviet socialist realism … If you weren’t doing that type of work you were jailed or murdered, and that was true across the arts.”
The Last Fridays launch shows the region’s arts scene is drastically different today, as is the country’s incorporation of technology into art. Part of the grant awarded to the university paid for a new multimedia lab in the university, in which students and faculty designed pieces for the art walk. One piece, an interactive twitterverse, is a modern approach to art even in the United States, showing how the city’s artists have advanced despite historical setbacks, Esser said.
The original plan was to hold Last Fridays outdoors, in Mother Theresa Square. Due to heavy snowfall three days before the Last Fridays launch, the event plowed through primarily indoors, but was still a huge success, Nimani said.
Nimani said an important element to the art walk’s success is its informal nature — the artists have a chance to show work directly to the public without going through a formal process of selection. Instead of slogging through formal requirements of institutions, artists can showcase their work to passerby and also interact with them in a more intimate setting.
“It was incredible and there was really a great level of energy and vibrancy,” Esser said of the event. He said the front page of the Pristina newspaper he read the following Sunday morning displayed the headline “Last Fridays Designs the Future.”
If First Fridays is any indication, Last Fridays in Pristina will have a big influence on the city. Nimani hopes to extend Last Fridays to Tirana, Albania, an even larger city than Pristina.
ASU Art Museum Director Gordon Knox said First Fridays has been important in the transformation of the Roosevelt Row area of Phoenix, which in turn has been a “major boom for downtown Phoenix.” ASU Museum’s artist residency program will continue into its third year, he said, bringing in more international artists to experience First Fridays and other arts and culture events in Phoenix. The hope is they will bring these ideas back to their home countries, just as Nimani, Rubbi and Bailet have done.
This intercultural interaction within the arts community is important, Knox said, because art connects science and technology to culture in order to express new ideas for the future.
“Art in many ways is the most uniquely well-placed discipline for solutions to problems the world faces,” Knox said.
Contact the reporter at ascline1@asu.edu
