11-02-2025
Board chair: Festival of the Arts died of old age
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — The way the board chair describes it, after 55 years, Grand Rapids' Festival of the Arts died of old age.
Some longtime volunteers were leaving and new volunteers were hard to find, Chairman Eddie Tadlock told News 8 in a phone interview.
'Basically, the volunteers were saying, 'You know what? We're tired,'' Tadlock said. 'That's it. And if you don't have volunteers who are willing to move the ball forward, it's not going to happen, and that is basically what it came down to.'
Festival of the Arts ending after 55 years
The board announced Saturday that it was ending the festival, though a statement didn't say why.
Launched in 1970, Festival of the Arts was ArtPrize before — the city of Grand Rapids' biggest summer draw by far. At its peak, some 250,000 people descended on the city every first weekend of June for the art, live performance and food booths (not necessarily in that order).
Lately, though, attendance had been cut in half. But the biggest challenge, the board chair said, was getting new volunteers and new ideas.
'They just started hitting roadblocks, 'Well, we're not going to change this because we've always done it this way,'' he said.
'It was like an undercurrent of resistance to change,' he said.
There's also the money: higher costs, less cash coming in. Tax records obtained by Target 8 show the nonprofit 501(c)(3) got much of its funding from private foundations and sales and just a few thousand from government grants.
'A lot of the foundations, the usual suspects, a lot of them have changed their focus on what they're going to fund, and Festival was falling out of that footprint,' Tadlock said.
From 2019 to 2021, Festival usually ended the year with about $200,000 in its fund balance. But by the end of 2022, the last year for which records were available, that fund balance was about $10,000. Festival took in nearly $247,000 that year, but spent $424,000, about half of that on labor and equipment. That's a $177,000 loss.
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Tadlock said finances had improved somewhat since then.
Still, Festival was already planning on a smaller event this year: fewer stages and a smaller downtown foot print, Tadlock said.
Then on Thursday, the board gathered for a Zoom meeting, along with some longtime volunteers.
'It's a big thing in the region. It's a really big thing,' Tadlock said. 'I was kind of hoping that we could, if nothing else, put it on pause. Say, OK, we're not going to do it in 2025. We need to get our ducks in a row and get our collective stuff together and come back reimagined in 2026.
'The rest (of those at the meeting) were just like, 'We're done.' These are folks who've been with Festival for years.'
The vote to shut it down, he said, was unanimous.
'It was very sad,' Tadlock said. 'I've been going to Festival since I moved to Grand Rapids in 2008 and it was always a highlight for me.'
In a written statement, longtime volunteer and former board co-chair Mark Azkoul wondered if Festival was the victim of changing times.
'Somewhere,' he wrote, 'too many of us stopped finding community by working shoulder to shoulder as volunteers… Perhaps today, we find that community through our phones instead.'
The board chair said he still hopes Festival could return, reimagined, in 2026.
'We haven't dissolved our 501(c)(3) status,' he said. 'My hope is to regroup, build a new board, build some new committees with some fresh blood, with people who have ideas and who have experience in doing different types of festivals and just reimagine Festival and be the phoenix rising out of the ashes.'
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