A diverse collection of artists from Maricopa community colleges across the Valley will showcase their “counterculture and unusual” artwork at the third annual Elemental: Cultural Arts Festival at Phoenix Art Museum.
Mesa Community College festival organizer and ceramics teacher Linda Speranza said this year’s festival will feature an eclectic mix of visual artwork, music, poetry, dance and electronic art, such as an augmented reality installation.
The festival was started to provide an outlet for students to showcase their artistic talents. It’s part of an ongoing commitment by Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) to sponsor the arts of its students.
District organizers are renting the space from the Phoenix Art Museum. While there is no formal partnership between the Phoenix Art Museum and MCCCD, the chancellor of the school district recently joined the museum’s board of trustees, according to Margaree Bigler, a spokesperson for the museum.
Speranza said the festival never discourages artists from taking a political stance in their works.
Last year, at least one piece featured President Donald Trump and several others revolved around hot-button immigration issues such as DACA Dreamers and border crossings.
Exhibits and performances will be set up throughout the museum, and while such a mish-mash of various sounds and visuals may appear chaotic, performer Ken Feighner said “It’s not the three-ring circus.”
To avoid a cacophony of sights and sounds, performances and visual art exhibits will be split up into time slots.
The festival will be divided into two parts, with the visual art exhibit from 5 to 5:30 p.m. and the performing arts from 5:30 to 9 p.m.
This will be Feighner’s second year performing the bagpipes at the arts festival. He will be “piping out” the festival on his bagpipes as the closing act.
Feighner, 56, is a student taking a ceramics course taught by Speranza at Mesa Community College.
Although he’s a bit older than some of his cohorts, Feighner finds commonalities with the younger crowd through a mutual love of the arts.
“I like hanging out with younger people and also I love art…when you have people who love something together, that becomes your common bond,” said Feighner. “As a result, I have a wider circle of friends…it enriches your life.”
Feighner has been in love with the bagpipes for most of his life.
“When I was six years old I told my parents ‘I want to play bagpipes’ and they said ‘that’s nice’ and they got me a saxophone,” he said. Wind the clock forward fifty years, Feighner travels around the country playing his bagpipes.
You can catch the bagpipe performance and a diverse range of artistic genres on April 4 at Phoenix Art Museum.
Artists from Glendale, Estrella Mountain, Phoenix, Paradise Valley, Rio Salado and Scottsdale community colleges will also be represented.
The festival is free and open to the public. Tickets are available at events.maricopa.edu.
Contact the reporter at madeline.ackley@asu.edu.
Madeline is the community editor for Downtown Devil and is a senior studying at the Walter Cronkite School. She is a local freelance journalist who primarily covers politics, policing, immigration and business. In 2019, she won first place in her category in the national SPJ Mark of Excellence Awards for her reporting on deported veterans in Tijuana, Mexico with Cronkite News.
