A typical outdoor art festival has big works — paintings, sculptures and the like — on display in rows and rows of large booths clustered together. At an upcoming art festival in Northampton, however, participants have to find the art themselves – it’s hidden, on purpose.
Fun Sized: A Tiny Public Art Festival will make its debut on Saturday, Sept. 26, and Sunday, Sept. 27. It’s set up as a scavenger hunt for participants to find 16 tiny works of art — miniature murals, sculptures, installations and the like — hidden in corners, storefronts, alleyways and other out-of-the-way spaces throughout a stretch of downtown Northampton.
A festival like this is “a way for artists to try out public art on a small scale, because public art tends to be large murals or large sculptures, and it’s hard for an artist to break into that and also think about those ideas around, ‘What’s it mean to put art into the public realm?’” said Kim Carlino, who co-founded the festival with her art partner Michael Crigler. The two run Bright Matter Studios, an art studio and consultancy based in Northampton.
“A lot of times, galleries or museums can feel like they’re separate spaces, and this allows us to to check a lot of boxes. It makes art fun and accessible. Also, by shrinking things down and having to look for it and making it a puzzle or a game, you create a sense of wonder and discovery,” Crigler said.
“People really need to walk around town and look for these things, and as they’re doing that, they’re also discovering local businesses, or, ‘Oh, I never knew there was a guitar shop here,’ or, ‘Oh wow, there’s a Moroccan food place here, that’s cool. We’re gonna get that for lunch,’” he added.
Here’s how it works: to do the scavenger hunt, find the map on the Fun Sized website or pick up a paper map in front of Thornes Marketplace, in front of Urban Outfitters, or at the Northampton Jazz Fest’s table at Pulaski Park. The map has a list of 15 numbered clues that guide participants to venues throughout downtown.
For instance: “Seek the castle where no king reigns, yet town decisions are made. A new treasure waits nearby,” or “I spiral upward and downward from floor to floor, carrying four-wheeled travelers but going nowhere.”
“If you don’t know Northampton, there’s things that maybe you won’t know — [a certain venue] has billiards, apparently; that, I didn’t know. But they do. And Kim’s like, ‘Everybody knows that!’ But maybe somebody in Springfield doesn’t know that,” said Crigler, who lives in Greenfield.
“I think it’s an opportunity for you to lean over to someone that you see also looking at their map and be like, ‘Hey, did you get that one?’ Maybe it creates moments for connecting and interacting. That’s my hope,” Carlino said.
The map doesn’t reveal the exact location of an artwork, though, just its general area. But hunters will know they are in the right place when they see a pink “X” on the ground. The artwork will be nearby. Once the artwork is found, hunters will look for a QR code, which they can scan to hear an audio recording of the artist talking about their work, and a letter that they match with that venue’s clue on the map.
Installations can be visited in any order, because at the end, the letters collected and put into a cryptogram will spell out a message.
The answer to the cryptogram will lead participants to the “Golden Moment,” the last installation in the scavenger hunt that is not listed on the map.
“Every piece is amazing, but this piece is really cool in the conceptual side of it and what it does, and it’s really, really fun,” Crigler said.
He pointed out that the location for the “Golden Moment” happened to have the perfect amount of letters for the cryptogram. “Once we figured that out, we’re like, ‘This is like the universe saying that this was the right choice.’”
The artist lineup includes Adam O’ Day, Chelsea Dupois, Cicely Carew, David and Fred Zinn, Dina Gjertsen, Eva Pushkova, Erika Zekos, Felipe Ortiz, John Higby, M Rudder, Maggie Nowinski, Michael Medeiros, Mary Cleary, Raishad Glover, Sally Curcio and Scout Cuomo, all but one of whom live in Massachusetts. They were chosen from an applicant pool of more than 60 artists.
Glover’s work is inspired by “Black excellence” and “the meditation that comes with that,” he said. He’s had large-scale works in a number of museums, but he said one of the pros of doing a work at a small scale is that the artist has to “guide the viewer to look and to focus and concentrate on things that are out of the ordinary, and with that, you build up a connection with the audience.”
Glover said he wants people to take away a feeling of “unity, harmony, peacefulness, and innovation” from his installation, “and to have them think outside the box when it comes to visual art.”
The whole scavenger hunt takes about an hour, Carlino and Crigler said, though participants are obviously encouraged to take their time exploring downtown as they go. As an incentive, there are also five venues with “tiny offerings” of goodies, food, or drinks.
The festival weekend will include artist and curator talks and live demonstrations. The artworks themselves will be up through the month of October, and some may be installed permanently.
“I think the more time you spend in a place and that you’re looking closely and you’re creating some kind of connection to a place, even a little tiny artwork … can be an anchor point to a place, and that creates a sense of belonging, and that sense of belonging creates care for a place,” Carlino said. “It’s a snowball effect.”
Participation in Fun Sized is free. For more information, visit funsizedartfest.com.
