By Logan Langlois
NASHVILLE, TN — The 2024 Kindling Arts Festival has recently announced the second half of the artists to be included in their impressive yearly roster. Kindling Arts Founding Artistic Director Jessika Malone said this is the festival’s seventh annual celebration, set to begin on Thursday, July 18, and continue until Sunday, July 21. She said this year’s theme is titled ‘Imperfections’, and explores how humankind as well as art itself is perfectly imperfect.
“We work with artists that are working outside of the traditional institutional models,” Malone said. “They’re making work that’s really risky and what we do is we hold their hand while they take that risk.”
Malone said the festival’s events will take place throughout several venues on each of the days scheduled, often simultaneously. She said performances will feature things such as dance showcases, suspended gravity performances, comedy shows, immersive choose-your-own-adventures, storytelling workshops, play readings, and more. Malone said Saturday will be featuring a piece she’s worked on closely named Monsterball, a free sports theater performance where a team of monsters square off against a team of human volunteers in Richland Park. Venue partners for the event include OZ Arts Nashville, Welcome to 1979, Darkhorse Theater, Nashville School for the Aerial Arts, Global Education Center Nashville, and Begonia Labs.
Malone said the biggest reason why Kindling Arts decided to announce the artists they’d be featuring this year through two separate press releases was because they wanted to allow each creator both space and time to be recognized. She said she, along with Kindling Arts, is always bursting with pride when they announce the artists they’re featuring. Malone said the yearly selection of artists is a rigorous process that takes place after an open invite to apply, after which staff takes the time to parse through over 100 yearly submissions.
Malone said when staff is selecting the pieces they want to showcase that year, they measure both how well the artist contributed to the year’s theme along with wanting to include a wide variety of displays from different artists that present themselves in a variety of unique ways. She said staff also check to make sure they have the technical and special capabilities to showcase the artist’s vision with the resources they have available.
“[We want] to make sure that there’s just a really, really wide variety,” Malone said. “That you can come and see just about any kind of work possible with us. We just try to say yes as often as we possibly can.”
Malone said staff settled on imperfections being the theme of the 2024 Kindling Arts Festival while discussing that 2024 would be the festival’s seventh running, and how the number seven has often been seen as a “lucky” or “perfect” number in many cultures. She said the team then discussed the inherent rigidity of “perfection” and how it is in many ways the nature of art and the artist to go against this idea.
Malone said it is the goal of Kindling Arts with every event they host to raise up Nashville artists. She said one threat the Nashville art scene is currently facing is that it is simply becoming too expensive for events to take place. Malone said while working to diversify the Nashville art scene, Kindling Arts hopes to encourage a culture in which artists collaborate rather than compete against one another.
“Another one of our goals is to encourage Nashvillians to take a risk on something that they might not have otherwise encountered because we’ve made it really easy and really welcoming for them,” Malone said.
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