Months after learning they’d lost access to the Artica festival's longtime home, organizers of the annual riverfront event announced on Thursday a location for this year’s gathering.
Artica Festival 2024 will happen Oct. 5-6 at an undeveloped parcel just northwest of the corner of South Second and Cedar streets, south of the Gateway Arch grounds downtown.
The site has a view of the Arch and more parking than the old location near the former Cotton Freight Depot building several blocks north. Yet it’s still out-of-the-way enough to preserve the event’s offbeat ethos, festival organizers said.
“It has that empty sandlot feel, where you can do anything or be anybody while you’re there, and that was part of the magic that had to happen,” said Artica Festival board President Lohr Barkley. “This has a lot of the same feel [as the former location]. Even though you feel even closer to the city, there’s something special about feeling that you’re in a magical, disconnected place while right around the corner is where the city is and where you are every day.”
Good Developments Group, which has proposed a $1.2 billion mixed-use development nearby to be known as Gateway South, will make the site in Chouteau's Landing available to Artica Festival for free, festival organizers said. The Gateway South project cleared a hurdle last month, when the Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority Board authorized $155 million in industrial revenue bonds for the project.
Artica leaders aren’t sure if the new location will be a permanent home. That’s ultimately up to Good Developments Group, and the timing of its future construction projects.
“Knowing that the development group is going to be building the area up, it's a really interesting time to be there — kind of in-between the before and after phase,” festival Executive Director Nicolette Emanuelle said.
Time to move
Festival organizers learned in March that property owner SCF wouldn’t allow them to return to the old festival site because of potential construction there.
They began the search for a new home that would satisfy the festival’s distinctive requirements, including proximity to the riverfront and safe conditions for the annual bonfire that ends the event. The St. Louis Fire Department informed Artica this week that the traditional “burn” can go forward at the new spot, Barkley said.
The uncertainty over the festival’s location had threatened to disrupt a time of growth for the event, which Nita Turnage and Hap Phillip founded in 2002.
Fewer than 500 people attended in 2017; the number rose to 1,254 last year. The 2023 festival earned $56,067 in income, besting the previous high of $38,618 set the year before. Nearly half of the income typically goes straight back to performing artists. Other expenses include temporary staff members, site preparation and insurance.
The festival is a nonprofit organization governed by a board of directors. Its major sources of funds are grants from the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis and the Missouri Arts Council.
Artica invites artists to create site-specific installations for the festival — a process that’s difficult to plan for when the location is unknown. Artist proposals for the 2024 were already closed before festival organizers landed on the new location.
“We encourage people to come look at the site so that they can work with it when thinking about their art installations,” Emanuelle said. “And even for performance art, we asked people to come in and use that as inspiration for whatever they're going to bring to Artica. And without that component, it was rough.”
With a festival location finally in place, Artica will hold site visits on Sunday and Tuesday for participating artists who want to get a look at the grounds. That comes as a relief to participating artists.
“I was definitely a little bit concerned that we wouldn't have flat enough land, or there would be concrete that we couldn’t drill into. There’s just a whole lot of questions when you don’t know where the space is going to be,” said Jasmine Raskas, who is collaborating with a team that plans to build a 30-foot dome this year.
The festival also is re-opening the submission process for artist proposals briefly, through July 10.
Though Artica funds specific projects based on formal submissions, artists are also invited to participate at their own expense.
