I'm Into This Place
I'm Into This Place is Clark County and Vancouver, Washington's arts, culture, and heritage podcast. We take you behind the scenes with the artists, makers, and organizations shaping our local culture - from art and music to food, history, and heritage. Listen in as we bring you interviews, event previews, and tips on where to explore. Let’s get into the stories, sounds, and spirit of Vancouver, Camas, Ridgefield, and beyond!
I'm Into This Place
The Biggest Event All Year: Vancouver Arts & Music Festival is Back! - 📍 Vancouver, WA
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
We’ll be there - will you? Let’s find out all the details, what not to miss, and why we’re so excited. Listen in as we catch up with Igor Shakman, COO of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Stacey Donovan, the Cultural Services Manager for the City of Vancouver, and curator Sharon Svec.
Come say hi! We’ll be at our booth every day recording shout outs of your favorites in arts, culture, and heritage for our Community Voices segment. You can also enter our raffle and vote for our Audience Choice Award to see who we’ll feature on the podcast next.
👀 For more info about VAMF, visit the episode page.
🎧 Other episodes you might like:
- What Comes After the Dream Changes: Sharon Svec on Art & Curation That Builds Creative Community
- Vancouver Arts and Music Festival Brings the World to Our Backyard
⭐️ Thank you to this episode's sponsor Riparian Media.
👋 Sign up for our newsletter.
📣 Share your voice on our Community Voices segment.
📍 Find more at imintothisplace.com.
The Vancouver Arts and Music Festival is back this week, and so we are back this week giving you an overview of where the festival came from, what's happening this year, and all of the exciting things you can look forward to. Now, before we jump into today's episode and a brief introduction of my guests, I want to remind you all that every year we have a booth at the festival. We're just to the west of the main stage, right in the middle of Esther Short Park. We've got a bright orange tablecloth. We're very hard to miss, so I hope you'll come by and say hi, and also come step into our mobile recording studio. Jessica Geffen of The Sound Stage, the Northwest's premier voiceover and recording studio, is bringing her mobile booth once again, and we are inviting you to step into the studio and shout out your favorite arts, culture, heritage organizations, artists, restaurants, favorite things to do around town. And then listen for your voice on an upcoming Community Voices segment, which we always have at the end of every episode, where you all get to shout out your favorites in our community. Also, tune in every day of the festival, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, right here on this podcast feed, where I will be sharing my favorite picks for the day. It's a very short mini episode where we shout out some of the things that you don't want to miss when you're headed down to the park. So you can listen to those while you're driving, walking, or biking, or on the bus, and you can make sure that you don't miss the coolest things going on. Now, if you come down to the festival, I hope that you will come by our booth. As I mentioned, that recording studio. But also, I've got a pretty good handle on what's going on in the park and who's where, and I can direct you to our favorite things So I hope that you enjoy this conversation. Today we're talking to Igor Shakman, the COO of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and Stacey Donovan, the Cultural Services Manager for the City of Vancouver. The two of them spoke to me last year about the festival and how they came together to create this incredible award-winning project. Over 50,000 people came to the festival last year, and this year is going to be no exception. After the break, we talk to Sharon Svec, who is a curator and artist here in our community. She also was on the podcast talking about her own work back in January. Sharon is the person who's coordinating a lot of the visual arts at the festival this year, including the juried art show at the Hilton and a couple of really fun surprises she tells us about during her segment. So I hope you'll take a listen to this episode today and then come back Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for those shorter segments. Otherwise, I'll see you at the park this weekend. Bring your sunscreen, a water bottle, and a good attitude. See you out there. Welcome to I'm Into This Place, your deep dive into the local arts, culture, and heritage of Clark County. From fabulous new restaurants to quirky art installations to the historical sites you never even knew to look for, we're inviting you along. Whether you're a Clark County connoisseur or just starting to get to know her, get ready to fall head over heels for this place we call home. I'm your host, Adriana Baer, and I'm into this place. Let's go. Igor and Stacey, welcome to I'm Into This Place. I'm so excited to have you both here today to talk about the festival.
Stacey:Thank you. We're both extremely excited and honored to be here today. This festival is very close to our hearts, so we're happy to share it with you.
Igor:Thank you for inviting us. Really thrilled to be here.
Adriana:I can't wait to hear a bit about both of you, and also just the origins of the festival and where we're headed this year, because it's growing tremendously year over year, and what we have coming up this week is so, so, so exciting. Introduce yourselves and your relationship to the festival.
Stacey:I'm Stacey Donovan, Cultural Services Manager for the city. So I support the special events program and the volunteer program, and the culture, arts, and heritage program for the city. My role is to support the city's side of the festival in conjunction with the symphony.
Igor:And I'm Igor Shakman. I'm COO of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. I've been with the organization since 2011. The idea of the festival, coming out of the pandemic, we felt like we needed to do something exciting because people were so starved for arts, for being together. And so we felt like having festival, something like that where we put the arts front and center would benefit everybody. Originally, I just wanted to ask Stacey for, uh, permits, information, and all that, and if the city would support it. But, uh, then Stacey said that they just had a retreat with the Arts and Heritage Committee, and they also wanted to create a festival. So we, uh, combined our forces, and that how we together came up with the idea of the arts and music festival. We approached, uh, Murdock Trust and asked them for funding for the festival and, you know, they were amazing. We applied for the grant, and we received a three years transformational grant to start the festival.
Adriana:That is so important, that kind of multi-year operational ground-up support from foundations or philanthropists to allow you breathing space to make something happen. That's so wonderful, and Murdock is such a treasure for our community.
Igor:Oh, yeah. Yeah. And their support inspired other funders to, uh, come in. And so we're just incredibly, uh, grateful.
Adriana:I love that everybody really was like, "The time is now to bring our community back together in person and celebrate both the growth that's happened and also the people who are here making work." Stacey, maybe you can give us a little bit of an overview of the festival. What have people come to expect, and what can they look forward to this year?
Stacey:Like Igor said, it was really important for our commission, our Culture, Arts, and Heritage Commission, to do a multi-day, multi-disciplinary festival that was free. We really understand and appreciate the importance of community events bringing people together. And of course, our Culture, Arts, and Heritage Commission also understands the need to support local artists. And working with the Symphony, we saw an opportunity to not only support the local, uh, arts community, but the Vancouver Symphony and the performers that they're able to bring in that are national and international performances. Each day ends with the Symphony doing a two-hour performance, but the rest of the day, we have multiple stages. We have a community dance stage and a community music stage. We have a food court. We've got workshops going on. It's important to us that this event have something for everyone. It's free. It's family-friendly. We want activities for attendees of all ages. Mm-hmm. Whether you're new to the arts world or you've been doing art forever, it's an opportunity to get in and meet the local artists, to see all of the different disciplines that we have here locally. We have a juried art show that is hosted in the Hilton. It's really an opportunity to expose the art that we have, the dance, the music, the different cultures, to the community, lift up voices and artists who are underserved in this community, and really help them see that they are valued, that the city values diversity. Um, it's very important to the city that we have culture and equity and inclusion in the city, and this festival really supports that. That's a big part of it for us.
Igor:What's important to us is to make sure it's free and accessible to everybody. This is a opportunity to show that classical music of the highest caliber is completely, totally accessible. You don't have to dress up. Just bring your family. Come have a picnic and listen, enjoy the highest quality, what's available in the world. And you don't have to even know a lot. You don't have to have any musical background. Just come and enjoy this incredible artistry.
Stacey:It's very important to us that we pay for all of the performances. So every music performance or dance performance or demonstration art that you see during the festival, these are paid performers. We're paying them. We're not asking anyone to do anything for free because we need to value this work. We want these opportunities to exist.
Adriana:Tell me a little bit about how you anticipate it growing in the future. What's your big vision?
Stacey:Eventually, what we'd like to see is Main Street Project is done and the festival grows over to the Main Street Festival Street, and it's maybe five days long, eventually maybe six days long. I think it's important to be inclusive of the local galleries and restaurants and businesses to make sure that they feel a part of this, too, that this festival really is a community.
Igor:The festival here is very unique. It's a very unique collaboration between the symphony and the city, and I'm really proud of that. And while it is unique here, the format of the festival is very common around the world. And what I think we should do eventually, we would increase the educational component of the festival. We already starting to do that. We have a All-Star Youth Philharmonic. We work with the local schools. We work with the teachers, and they select the most advanced students. They will rehearse every month, and then at the end they will have an hour-long performance on Saturday on the main stage, and it will involve some of our stars, artists, and conductor, and it will be an amazing experience for students. And you know what's interesting, uh, when we started this festival, I can't even tell you how many people told me to keep our expectations low. Three to five years just to get it on the radar. But you know, we were so successful immediately. So the first festival attracted 30,000 people. Then second festival, 40,000 people. It broke all the expectation. It, uh, becomes successful right away. So there's no really playbook for us. The sky is the limit.
Adriana:Well, one thing I know, running a podcast about arts, culture, and heritage in our community, is that there's a strong desire for more access. There's a strong desire to come together, and there's a whole lot going on here And all we have to do is shine a light on it, and people are so excited to participate either as artists or as audience.
Stacey:Yeah, we're really seeing that, and that is a big part of the success of the festival. Of course, it takes a lot of stakeholders and partners to bring this together, but it's the community's desire to see this that really makes it successful in my mind.
Igor:I'm really excited about Vancouver becoming true cultural destination. Bring your family, come to Vancouver, spend the whole day with us.
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Sharon:Yes. I'm so excited to be here again. Thanks for having me. And, uh, yeah, we have just numerous, numerous opportunities for folks to get involved with art. From, uh, visiting vendor booths to workshops to, uh, multiple art exhibits and even a interactive installation that folks could get involved with.
Adriana:So cool. So let's start with the festival art exhibit at the Hilton Hotel. Give us the rundown about that.
Sharon:Yeah. This is the, the second year for the festival art exhibit inside the Hilton, and, uh, we have generally about 150 works on display. This year's theme is community, environment, and culture. And we'll be giving away five awards. We have a People's Choice Award, so we would love for folks to come in and vote for People's Choice, and then a Mayor's Choice Award, and then three other awards that will be handed out by arts professionals in the community. Now, what folks get for this is a $300 cash prize per artist, a custom sculpture by local artist Russ Ford, as well as additional opportunities to exhibit in the future.
Adriana:Which ties into one of our other locations, which is at the Corridor Gallery space. Tell us about that.
Sharon:Yeah. So the Corridor Gallery is located inside the Esther Short Building, which is on the corner of 6th and Esther Street, just right by the roundabout, and we are going to feature the 2025 award recipients in their own show in that building. So that will be in the corridor part of the building, and then inside the West Park community room, we will have select works from the Clark College Student Annual Exhibit.
Adriana:Wonderful. So we're tying in the arts education piece as well there. That's very cool. And as a reminder for those of you who have not yet listened to our interview with Sharon from back in January, you are the curator of the Corridor Gallery year-round, one of your many spaces.
Sharon:It is one of my many spaces, and I am really grateful to the occupants of the Esther Short Building for allowing us to have the space and use the space during the festival.
Adriana:Okay, tell us about this really cool interactive piece that's happening at the pavilion.
Sharon:Oh, yes. So we're calling it Gathering at the Gazebo, and we are creating, uh, these just lovely fabric strands that will hang and produce sort of a calming environment that you can walk through and take a little break. And there will be, uh, little cards where you can write down what you want for your creative community and attach those to the strands. That's the interactive piece. And the other interactive element is, um, we'll have a working loom on site, and you can sit down and do some weaving yourself and be a part of a community-woven project.
Adriana:That's very cool. I saw some of the fabric being stitched together or tied together by community members, just regular old folks like me, at the Arts Hub a while back, and it was really cool to get to think about just a, a piece that I had something to do with being, there at the festival with everybody else's hands involved as well. And I do wanna highlight that this also came about as an idea of how to create a little bit of a quiet or calm space in the midst of the excitement of the festival. But 50,000 people come through this festival every year, and that can feel like a lot of folks. So if you're somebody who just needs a little break, you can either come and hide in our recording booth for a few minutes in the dark [laughter] or you can go over to the pavilion and, and have a little calmer moment. So that's very cool.
Sharon:Yeah.
Adriana:You mentioned workshops. What are those?
Sharon:Oh, yeah. So we have, uh, lots of workshops going on. Pegasus Puppets is going to have a puppet parade on Sunday morning, and so leading up to that, like on Family Day on Friday, or on any of the days, you could really go over to their booth and make a puppet and be part of the puppet parade. We have Family Rhythms joining them. They'll be offering opportunities to make noise and make music as a family and be a part of that parade as well. Artstra is gonna have some workshops.
Adriana:Well, definitely check out the website or stop by our booth, and I can tell you exactly where all the workshops are happening around the park. Sharon, is there anything else that you're really excited about for this year?
Sharon:Yeah. I'm excited about the rare birds, which is an idea that we had to add some color to the canopy in the park, to involve artists and groups in a group project. We're making birds almost four feet from head to tail that will hang from the trees and be painted by local artists and local groups in various colors and forms. And so, uh, Alison Berkey and Christian Barrios of La Casita are forming those birds, and then artists in the community lead groups to paint them.
Adriana:I can't wait to see those. Thank you Sharon so much for stopping by to talk to us about the visual arts that you can see this weekend at the festival. I am super excited to sneak over to the Hilton and get a peek at all the awesome stuff.
Sharon:Yay. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Adriana:I'm Into This Place is produced and edited by me, Adriana Baer. Special thanks to Jessica Geffen of The Sound Stage, the Northwest's premier voiceover and recording studio, for letting us use her space to record this episode. Jessica and I will be at the festival every day with our mobile recording studio. Come step into the booth and record a shout-out of your favorite artist, cultural organization, restaurant, heritage site, whatever you want. You'll hear your voice on an upcoming episode as part of our Community Voices segment. Our booth is just west of the main stage in the center of Esther Short Park. We'll see you there.
