Logan Square’s Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival is billed as the “most diverse & vibrant” of Chicago’s art fests. A pet project of 35th Ward alderman Rey Colón, it’ll run July 23-25 this year and cover a 1.5-mile stretch of Milwaukee from Kimball to California, turning more than 20 empty storefronts into ad hoc galleries showcasing the work of about 200 visual artists. Three official stages will offer live music, with a free trolley cruising from one end of the strip to the other. Organized by a new nonprofit assertively named I AM Logan Square (short for Independent Artists & Merchants of Logan Square), this fest looks to be better organized than 2009’s, which stretched over three miles with considerable dead space along the way.
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I AM Logan Square was set up by Colón and launched last winter. Montañez himself is a board member, but “unfortunately,” he says, “the board has never met.” Colón named publicist Amy Falk of Falk Associates as executive director. She says she made a two-year commitment to manage the organization, her services through December 2011 to be paid for by Mark Fishman, president of Logan Square property management firm M. Fishman and Company, as a “gift to the community.”
Montañez argues that the predominance of indie rock is turning the festival into a “Pitchfork wannabe.” He points to the Saturday main-stage lineup of eight bands, none of them Latino. Among the acts are the Black Bear Combo, the Blue Ribbon Glee Club, and the 1900s.
The Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival is an outgrowth of the Palmer Square Arts Festival, held under Colón’s auspices from 2003 to ’07. The MAAF began on a small scale in 2008, put together by a group of local arts organizations. Last year Colón ran a larger version that was a popular success despite the red ink, which the alderman says he covered with his own credit card. This time around Colón let it be known that he needed to hand it off. Ergo, I AM Logan Square, which, Colón hopes, will eventually serve as a year-round, “one-stop” PR office for the neighborhood.
Colón says the fest is the catalyst for his plan to use art as an economic development tool for Milwaukee Avenue. But “taking people with different interests and agendas and getting them to work on one thing is really a difficult task. It’s hard to get everyone to get along. I didn’t realize there was politics within the art community.”
