HISTORY—Geographic expansion begins
Another major new frontier for FIGMENT opened when Jason Turgeon, who had just returned to his hometown of Boston after his first trip to Burning Man, and stumbled onto a post that David Koren had written on the Burning Man blog. Jason was inspired by Burning Man, and wanted to create something local in Boston that could capture the spirit and energy of Burning Man. The more he read about FIGMENT, the more that he thought that this could be a model for what he wanted to make happen in Boston. Jason shot David an email, and David invited Jason to come down to New York to see the 2009 sculpture garden and minigolf course before it was de-installed. Jason and David immediately began talking about a summer 2010 event in Boston.
Later that fall, David made a trip up to Boston with Debra Keneally, and Jason took them on our tour of Franklin Park, his preferred location for a FIGMENT event. David made an open presentation on FIGMENT at the Boston Public Library, and a team started to coalesce around Jason as the Producer of FIGMENT Boston. Jason and David worked on a grant proposal to the Black Rock Arts Foundation for FIGMENT Boston, which was accepted and became the third grant received by FIGMENT from BRAF.
Unfortunately, the process of getting permission to do an event in a public park in Boston seemed inscrutable, and seemed to go nowhere fast. Jason was introduced to the Cambridge Arts Council, who had been running their annual Cambridge River Festival for over 30 years as a successful one-day arts festival featuring art for sale, commercial vendors, and free stages for local music and performance. They had arranged a larger area for the 2010 festival than they could fill, and they were interested in partnering with FIGMENT to bring a more community-oriented feeling to the festival. Jason learned that Peter Durand, the Burning Man Regional Contact for Boston, had met with the Cambridge Arts Council previously and had in many ways laid the groundwork for this collaboration.
The first FIGMENT event outside of New York City took place on Memorial Drive in Cambridge on Saturday, June 5, 2010, in partnership with the Cambridge Arts Council and next to the Cambridge River Festival. The event featured nearly 100 participatory arts projects, and had approximately 5,000 participants, many of whom had never experienced a participatory arts event before. The three most common questions visitors would ask of the team were, “What is this? Why is nothing for sale? Why is everyone smiling?” It was a great experience for FIGMENT to be a next to an established arts festival, and to see how that audience interacted with and experienced participatory art. A number of team members from New York made the trip to Boston for the event, including David Koren, Debra Keneally, Wylie Stecklow, Ryan Fix, Julie Ziff Sint, Tracy Gillan, and Andrea Schneider.
At the first FIGMENT NYC core team meeting after FIGMENT Boston, some of the team members who weren’t able to make it to Boston asked, “So, did it feel like FIGMENT?” The answer: “Yes, it felt like FIGMENT! It was FIGMENT!” The lesson is that FIGMENT can be replicated, and that FIGMENT is FIGMENT wherever it takes place. This is not a “regional” or “franchise” structure. Each new event in a new location is unique and special, but it’s also, essentially, a FIGMENT event.
(The FIGMENT Boston 2010 web page is here: http://figmentproject.org/2010/events/figment-boston-2010/)
