The Child and TWT wandered down to Tacoma's Dock Street Waterfront Park yesterday to explore the eighth annual
Urban Art Festival. TWT wasn't sure how they've survived this long. There were moments and areas that we enjoyed, but overall the event seemed simultaneously messy and sparse.
There were too few booths for the arts community I'm aware of in Tacoma. They were scattered about a large space, which was fine for wandering, but didn't seem conducive to conversations and cross-fertilization of ideas and media. The DJ Stage and Main Stage were too close to one another, sometimes effectively drowning out one another, which didn't make sense considering how large the area of use was. Rather than have both stages at one end of the park, they should have each anchored an end with all of the booths and happenings between.
Another problem was lack of a schedule of events at the event. I'm sure something was printed up in one of the local newspapers, but I couldn't find anything at the Urban Arts Festival other than nearly illegible boards that had what I assume were schedules. (Save the "fancy" scrawl for your artwork; make the public announcements, such as schedules, readable.)
All that being said, there were a few areas that stimulated the sense of TWT:
A founding member of
C.L.A.W. (and founding chalk artist of the
Frost Park Chalk Off) set up shop with the FREE CHALK box and let people go wild, which they did.
The DJ Stage dropped some heavy beats.
A bicyclist catches some air on some homemade urban-decorated ramps.
