For two decades, The Glenwood Avenue Arts Fest (GAAF) has presented a free, weekend-long arts festival featuring 120+ artists, open studios, and live entertainment on two outdoor stages. This year White Mystery curated a lineup of 30+ live bands and a focus on an inclusive experience for guests with disabilities.
White Mystery
“Music and art are intertwined, and Glenwood Avenue Arts Fest is a perfect example of where the two creative forms meet.”
Monarchy Over Monday
“Music is art, everything around us is art, everything influences our art.”
Coyote Man
“Our music is instrumental and takes the listeners imagination on a journey to different emotions.”
Ovef Ow
“One of the most energizing and rewarding aspects of making music is the way it opens up opportunities to collaborate with artists of different mediums.”
Wild Earp & The Free for Alls
“Music is art (yes even country western music), and our music is just a way to try to make sense of and give added significance to the human condition. We love to use different media to create and inform the world of the band and the characters, from concept albums to radio plays to coloring books. Art exists in a conversation with reality, and that’s especially true in how we perceive the American West, our country’s history, and its relationship to country music. We’re having fun within that conversation, and are trying to be responsible with how we use it.”
Clickbait
“Art is what fills in the spaces we leave in our music. The audience adds what they want to hear, we just provide the skeleton of dance music.”
Bev Rage & the Drinks
“As a queer band, we aim to push boundaries in our music, live show, costuming, and audience interaction. It is all influenced by our individual art, and pieced together into a big ol’ loud gay mess. An artistic mess with a vision, though.”
Funkadesi
“We are inspired by art, where culture, identity, and belonging are all at play. Expression of our full humanity is at the core of our music.”
Tierra Roja
“Art is part of our culture, when arranging our music we often bring pieces into perspective from Mexican Artists. “
Tamarie T and the Elektra Kumpany
“Art influences my music greatly, I feel like my music is what a painting would look like transformed into sound. Music is a vibrational form of art.”
Bianca Shaw
“I feel as if I’m painting a vivid picture through music for my audience. Art helps refresh my perspective around topics, with visual art I receive messages that inspire me to create a new form of art through music.”
Tinkerbelles
“People are starting to figure out that experiences are worth more than possessions. The experience of art is more valuable and when you know that you incorporate it into everything you do.”
Tommy Carroll’s Calculated Discomfort
“The arts highlight alternative and better futures for the world that I want my music to soundtrack.”
Plastic Crimewave Syndicate
“I am a visual artist primarily, with a degree in Painting, so i always think of sound as textural and creating a mood, like the best visual art does–and the best art of any type takes you to another place completely.”
Waltzer
Stories with sounds and colors inspire me to write, because those are the only stories I understand. – Sophie Sputnik”
Duke Davenport
“Art imitates life imitates life imitates art. Is it even art when it’s your life? You be the judge.”
Cass Cwik & the Small Gas Engines
“We derive our music from early folk and rock and roll roots to the more improvised sounds of the Grateful Dead.”
Osmium House
“(Visual) Art is influential for our music because it is a vessel to help convey the aesthetic of our music! Visual art sets the scene for musical voyages!”
Joanna Connor Band
“The passion and honesty of America’s greatest musical gift to the world, and all popular music of the 20th and 21st centuries and the expressiveness of my chosen instrument- the guitar, are all vehicles that communicate my humanity and life experience to the works at large.”
AIR CREDITS
“Air Credits is a band that exists in multiple timelines, their music is influenced by the art of every generation, even the ones that haven’t happened yet.”
The Polkaholics
“THE POLKAHOLICS are a Chicago band that plays a high-speed collision of polka and rock ‘n roll!”
Urban Rhythm Band
“Diverse group of musicians from Haiti Philippines and Africa with American Indian influence our music style.”
For two decades, The Glenwood Avenue Arts Fest (GAAF) has presented a free, weekend-long arts festival featuring 120+ artists, open studios, and live entertainment on two outdoor stages. This year, Miss Alex White & Francis White are booking all 32 bands for the Chicago-based street festival. Attendees view and purchase handmade artworks directly from the creators. The Fest brings free live music, performances and art demonstrations — along with street food and craft beer from local merchants on the cobblestone streets of the Glenwood Avenue Arts District in Chicago’s historic Rogers Park neighborhood.
The 20th annual Fest will take place the weekend of August 20-22, 2021.
Photographer Alan Koss, known for his iconic pictures of Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock in 1969, shot White Mystery at the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival in 2019. Check out Alan Koss from Chicagosee here.
