10 minute read
Athens of Missouri
Juneteenth
Black heritage is celebrated at Douglass Park in central Columbia with bands, choirs, speakers, games and food. www.gocolumbiamo.com.
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Hot Summer Nights
A six-week lineup of musical performances ranges from classical to pop. The event sponsored by the Missouri Symphony Society provides entertainment to all ages with a diverse repertoire. www.mosymphonysociety. org.
JULY ◄ Fire in the Sky Annual free fireworks celebration of the Fourth of July will take place in downtown Columbia. www.gocolumbiamo.com.
Show-Me State Games
The Olympic-style sports event hosts competitors in approximately 40 sports, including judo, tennis, golf and soccer, to promote healthy competition and sportsmanship. www.smsg.org.
Mizzou International Composers Festival
Audiences are exposed to musical world premieres during this festival, where established composers mingle with and coach emerging composers from across the globe. newmusicsummerfestival. missouri.edu.
AUGUST
MidMo Pridefest
An annual celebration of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning and ally community in MidMissouri. This event features music, food, vendors, children’s activities and information on community organizations. www.midmopride.org.
Boone Dawdle
The True/False Film Fest hosts this annual summer bike ride from Columbia to Rocheport, where a dinner is served and a film is screened. www.truefalse. org/dawdle.
SEPTEMBER
Boone County Heritage Festival and Craft Show
The festival celebrates the history of Mid-Missouri by bringing in artisans
and tradesmen to demonstrate their trades and sell their wares. The event also provides music, hay rides, children’s activities and more. www.gocolumbiamo.com.
Roots N Blues N BBQ festival ▲ Held in Stephens Lake Park, this large celebration features a variety of music, food and other entertainment, drawing in thousands of people from across the country. www.rootsnbluesnbbq.com.
OCTOBER
Hartsburg Pumpkin Festival
Held the second full weekend in October in Hartsburg, the event features craft vendors and a variety of pumpkinrelated activities, plus lots of pumpkins for sale in all shapes, sizes and colors. www.hartsburgpumpkinfest.com.
University of Missouri Homecoming
Celebrate with a parade and tailgates, plus myriad campus activities over the preceding week, including extravagant Greektown house decorations. www. missouri.edu.
“We Always Swing” Jazz Series
The jazz program brings in top talents to Columbia, offering an educational program and films to promote, preserve and celebrate jazz. Performances generally start in October and are scheduled through the following spring. wealwaysswing.org.
Odyssey Chamber Music Series
This concert series presents intimate yet ambitious chamber music performances at First Baptist Church. The series consistently calls on local talent, yet mingles in guest performers from across the country and world. Concerts generally get underway in October and run through May. Odyssey also works with a number of other cultural organizations to present The Plowman Chamber Music Competition and Festival during the spring of odd-number years. odysseymissouri.org.
Spooktacular
This annual and free alternative to door-to- door trick-or-treating on Halloween night features games, activities and treats. www.gocolumbiamo.com.
NOVEMBER
Columbia Jaycees Holiday Parade
On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, this kid-friendly event includes a parade with visits by Santa and Mrs. Claus. www. columbiamojaycees.com.
Black Culture Awareness Week
Centered on the mission of the Gaines/ Oldham Black Culture Center at MU, the weeklong event features a soul food dinner, musical performances, guest speakers and discussions. diversity.missouri.edu.
DECEMBER
Living Windows Festival
On the first Friday in December, the downtown district hosts live window displays, strolling carolers, visits with Santa and more. www.discoverthedistrict.com.
Holiday Homes Tour
Serving as the primary fundraiser for the Women’s Symphony League, the tour features some of Columbia’s most decorated homes to celebrate the holiday season. The event hosts a silent auction and bake sale. mosymphonysociety.org/ womens-symphony- league.
City Kwanzaa Celebration
This annual event celebrates the black holiday based around family and community. A free holiday feast, entertainment and community awards will be given at the event. www.gocolumbiamo. com.
ALEX GEORGE
As a published novelist (with his seventh title on the way in May 2020), owner of Skylark Bookshop and founder of the Unbound Book Festival, Alex George has his finger on the pulse of Columbia’s literary scene. He asserts that Columbia continues to be an Athens-esque hotbed for culture because of the smart and engaged community that attracts it.
“I always knew that a book festival would work well here because we have a community that embraces these kinds of things,” George said. “You don’t do these things in a vacuum; you need to have an audience for it. We’re really lucky to have a community that embraces these sorts of artistic things. That’s the key.”
It’s no secret that Columbia loves its festivals, but its affinity for the arts runs much deeper. George illustrated this by recounting a recent Thursday night out. He went to a poetry reading — but if he hadn’t attended that, he could have seen the University of Missouri Choral Union perform Mozart or listened in at a fiction reading at Fretboard Coffee. With regular jazz performances from the “We Always Swing” Jazz Series, productions from GreenHouse Theatre Project (among many others) and open-mic poetry readings via the OneMic collective, options abound for entertainment and cultural experiences in Columbia.
In April the Unbound Book Festival brought 57 poets and authors to Columbia for its fourth festival. Attended by 9,000 this year and drawing keynotes from authors like George Saunders, the festival is proving to the publishing world that Missouri isn’t just flyover territory.
“It’s all very well putting Columbia on the map, but that’s not really the point,” George said. “The point is the difference we’re making in people’s lives.”
“You don’t have to travel down I-70 to experience world-class acts. They’re right here on our doorstep,” said author, Unbound Book Festival founder and Skylark Bookshop co-owner Alex George [COURTESY]
George says anecdotally the Unbound team hears that the festival is making reading relevant again. Outside the festival weekend, George is cultivating a bookish community around Skylark Bookshop, located on Ninth Street.
Opening in August 2018, Skylark uses its space as a platform by holding events for local authors and supporting and stocking their work.
George said the shop hosts a local writer night for those who are self-published or those don’t have a traditional publishing deal. The available spaces fill almost immediately, George said, citing Columbia’s endless stream of talent and creative energy and the need for venues to showcase it.
“I would say that the key word with an independent bookstore ought to be discovery,” George said. “It’s about finding things that you didn't actually know that you wanted until you walked in and found them under your fingers.”
This sense of discovery is led by curiosity and followed by learning, which ultimately leads to an engaged, educated populace. This band of readers and writers attracts and engages with all types of arts and culture, creating a feedback loop that continually elevates the offerings and opportunities in Columbia.
“We have every reason to be very proud of this community,” George said. “As small as we are, I think it’s extraordinary that we punch above our weight in many ways. It’s not about the people who put these things together; it’s about the audience.”
Jazz icon Branford Marsalis will return to Columbia as part of the 2019-20 “We Always Swing” Jazz Series [COURTESY]
KENNY GREENE
If Columbia is Athens, then the North Village Arts District would be its beating heart, the city’s epicenter of innovative and artistic culture.
“We have breweries. We have wineries. We have distilleries. We have culinary delights of all kinds,” Kenny Greene said. “And we have each other.”
For 35 years Greene, owner of Monarch Jewelry, has done business in the North Village Art District. An artist himself, he creates handcrafted jewelry that can be spotted on necks, wrists and ring fingers all over town. He is the current president of the North Village Art District’s board of directors and can attest that the area and the artists in it work consistently and continually to elevate Columbia’s culture.
Several businesses and entrepreneurs call the North Village home. Artists — such as Shannon Webster and Tootie Burns — work alongside shops, services and eateries, such as Drinkraft and Coming Home, a home goods store. The North Village lives up to its name: It’s Columbia’s most concentrated area of art galleries, including staples like the Sager Braudis Gallery, Orr Street Studio and Artlandish Gallery.
First Friday brings all of North Village’s players to life for one night a month. Galleries stay open late and entertainers come out to play, so guests can experience the area’s quirky culture after hours.
“We’re the cultural center that radiates out into the rest of the city,” Greene said.
Greene asserts we could have more culture and art if we invested in it. He said many of our local and state government officials don’t understand the importance of a healthy art community, which was vital to the growth and vibrancy of places like Athens and Florence in their heyday.
“They feel that artists are going to [create] no matter what, which is one of the problems because artists do,” Greene said. “They do things on a wish and a prayer. They work jobs so they can do their art. They supplement their incomes, and they give to organizations over and over again to keep the arts going. But they're working with so little, and they could do so much more.”
Greene said that’s why he volunteers for arts organizations; it’s another way of adding value by committing his time and resources to help build what he finds important.
“We have been really proud of what we've done as an arts organization within North Village,” Greene said. “There are so many other people in town that support the arts and support the community and show and know the value of our work.”
JENNIFER SCHENCK
Without innovation and risk-taking new ideas, Athens wouldn’t have been the groundbreaking, democracyestablishing birthplace of Western culture we know it to be. The innovation that took place on the streets and in the community defined its place in history.
Jennifer Schenck says Columbia has a similar spirit — one focused more on collaboration than competition. Schenck co-founded and co-owns The Connection Exchange, a welcome service for new businesses and new residents in the area, and serves on the community organizing team for 1 Million Cups, a weekly gathering where new businesses present ideas and get feedback from the community.
“If we're all working together, we're all improving, “ Schenck said. “If we all have that higher level of energy and interest in each other, then it's just going to make the community as a whole better and improved because of it.”
A few factors propel Columbia’s innovative spirit. Our city has multiple co-working spaces, like The Hatchery and REDI Innovation Hub, where Columbia can come together to both work individually and co-create. Schenck said the city’s colleges and universities and its young entrepreneurs encourage a vibrant, engerized spirit.
The business community is invested, both in time and money, in fostering new ideas. Figures from all aspects of the business world, including entrepreneurs, academics, investors, sole proprietors, business professionals and side hustlers, come together weekly at 1 Million Cups to work towards this common goal. Schenck said the event includes time for presentations, tough questions and connectionbuilding conversations. The concept is centered around the question of "What can our community do for you, new business owner)?"
Healthy competition and curiosity encourages innovators to spur each other on for the betterment of the community. Small businesses and start-ups band together in Columbia in a collaborative and supportive way, similar to the communities we have centered on local art and new food.
“I don't think you see that in other communities with this population size,” Schenck said. “Columbia just has this really funky, awesome vibe to it that I think you’d be more likely find in a place like Austin, Texas. That's such a huge population metro area, but yet we have those kinds of things here.”
Schenck cites concepts like rolled ice cream, cat cafes, ax throwing and growler filling stations as some of our city’s unique businesses. Columbia acts as fertile ground for the seeds of new ideas. Schenck’s own business is a testament to this: She started The Connection Exchange four years ago and now has two locations in St. Louis and one in Springfield with the goal of going nationwide.
