At the end of this month, Northwestern’s Intercultural Development office will host the first ever Beloved Music and Arts Festival. The event will feature music, games and food and is free for students and the public.
The idea to host the festival came about during a retreat at the beginning of the year for the office’s intern. Sophomore Adebola Adeyemo suggested the idea during the retreat, and from there the planning started.
“Even though I already had some things scripted down, as we were going around, it kind of came to my head in the spur of the moment and became something that just had to happen,” Adeyemo said. “So during the fall semester it was kind of on the low. but over winter break, Rahn [Franklin] and I began to set up some ground work in terms of structuring what the event would actually look like.”
After meeting with NW’s Director of Student Programs Aaron Beadner, Adeyemo and Franklin eventually met with Lindsay Bauer, the Executive Director at Orange City Arts, to collaborate.
“Before the meeting with her, the event was set to be called ‘The Beloved Music Festival’, to only feature musical performances, but she then opened up the possibility of featuring artwork from the juried art show,” Adeyemo said. “Although that won’t be directly featured during the event, it gave rise to the name: the Beloved Music and Arts Festival.”
So with advice from Bauer and financial help from the Student Government Association, the event started rolling. Adeyemo hopes that the event will be a relaxed and welcoming environment for students and the public to come and share in art, music and festivities together in beloved community — a concept that has been emphasized this year by the Intercultural Development office.
“The word ‘beloved’ defines the backbone of the event, which is the promotion of the beloved community and what it means to be love, loved and the beloved community. The focus of the event is to encourage the bringing together of people in celebration of art, music, performance and love,” Adeyemo said. “In the future, we hope to have even more student performers that cover even more diverse forms of music and art, to be able to express themselves around that central theme, under their own interpretation of what it means to be love, loved and the beloved community through their talents.”
The event will feature music and spoken word poetry, with a few of the performers including Professor Lief, Professor Hubers, Bethany Dykstra, Armani Johnson and Hannah Hennings.
The games of the night will include bean bag toss, ladder ball, KanJam and Spikeball. There will also be activities like face painting and henna offered. Additionally, there will be burgers and hotdogs available from dining services for a meal swipe or $5 for community members.
If you are interested in checking out the festival, hit the campus green, anywhere from 4:30 to 7 p.m. on Friday, April 27, to support the arts and hear some local music.
