Finally, The Moment(ary)

Long awaited music festival expands culture and community

After multiple postponements and years in the making, the Momentary in Bentonville will finally host its very first music festival, FreshGrass, Oct. 1-2. The festival debuted in North Adams, Mass., at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in 2011 and has been on the road to a Bentonville premiere for some time.

The Momentary staff have been working closely with MASS MoCA since the multidisciplinary arts venue’s inception, and visitors to both would notice a lot of similarities between the two institutions, shares Senior Communications Manager Emily Neuman. For one thing, both brought new creative life to industrial spaces, transforming former factories into community cornerstones that foster boundary-crossing artwork by bringing visual and performing arts together in one central location.

“There’s been a lot of visits to MASS MoCA, conversations with that team, research that we did with them of what it means to bring this type of space to an area that might not have had one before, and successes they’ve seen and how we might apply that here at the Momentary,” Neuman details. “You could almost say that the conversations [about the festival] started back when we even started looking at what the Momentary could be, what we wanted to do with this space, what we wanted to bring to our community.”

The FreshGrass Foundation, the nonprofit behind the festival’s organization, was formed to celebrate and create innovative grassroots music. Artists from across the country at “very different levels of their careers” will converge on Bentonville for the two-day, family-friendly festival.

“It’s been a wonderful collaboration,” Neuman enthuses. “We can bring some of the local musicians and some of the more seasoned ones that live all over the country together and show what bluegrass and roots music is here in Northwest Arkansas [and] what it is on that larger scale.”

If that ethos sounds familiar, it could be because another Bentonville-based, by way of Austin, arts organization has been facilitating collaboration among

(Courtesy Photo/Stephen Ironside, via the Momentary) “What this means to the Momentary, I think this kind of launches some of those events and festivals that we have not been able to hold yet, and look forward to holding more and more as the years go on,” shares Emily Neuman, senior communications manager at the Bentonville multidisciplinary arts space. Originally scheduled for the spring after the Momentary's February 2020 opening, the inaugural FreshGrass Bentonville finally premieres Oct. 1-2.