The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
FireFish engages artists
Festival helping those becoming established in city
The FireFish Festival will evolve in 2021 as the downtown Lorain arts event returns from a year of postponement due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Lorain-area artists gathered April 14 to discuss the festival’s origins and goal to use the arts as an aesthetic and economic catalyst to revive Broadway.
FireFish co-founder Joan Perch, with board President Frank DeTillio, co-founder and Treasurer Janet Garcia and board member Dina Ferrer, met in-person and online with a batch of creative workers who are becoming established in the city. The goals were simple: Do your thing, Perch wrote at the top of the to-do list.
“Be who you are,” she said. “You were chosen to be here because we were looking for a core group of people who were professional in quality and who have relationships with us or that we knew were invested in downtown Lorain.”
Photographer Jason Shaffer volunteered his studio, 633 Broadway, for the meeting with Hiatt Hernon, David Morales, Jevon Terance, Joshua Biber, Carida Diaz, Dan Biber, John Baumgartner and Candice Pettigrew, FireFish’s marketing and operations manager.
Online were Jaclyn Bradley, Daisy Goddard, Luke Theall and Ryan Craycraft.
As FireFish’s community arts program manager, Craycraft will serve as a contact for other artists who want to get involved.
The group does “damn good work,” she said.
Perch asked the group to collaborate with FireFish and others.
In pandemic conditions, everyone is doing the best they can, so the artists should avoid judgment and communicate directly with the board, Perch said.
She shared a list of FireFish’s sponsors and financial supporters and asked the group members to say thank you if they meet.
DeTillio, a former Lorain city councilman, also is a fine arts painter.
He worked for years as president of the Lorain County Chamber of Commerce and understands the intersections of arts, the local economy and solving problems to help a community, Perch said.
The organization’s name connects to Lorain — fire that powered industry and remains lit in the hearts of residents, fish that connect to Lake Erie, the Black River and the city’s waterfront.
Perch credited the work of James Levin, who served as executive director for the early festivals.
There will be opportunities for art installations with Broadway in Bloom displays and Lorain developer Victor Nardini has opened his building, the former Cleveland Trust Bank at 383 Broadway, as a performance and display space again.
The artistic movement has some crossover with Main Street Lorain.
FireFish will have monthly events alongside Main Street Lorain’s First Friday events in June, July, August and September, and Pettigrew also is promotions committee chairwoman for Main Street.
Even in pandemic conditions, Lorain painter Jeff Pye this year marked Black History Month with the “Start W/ Art” arts program with the Harrison Cultural Community Center.
Hernon created the video compilation “Satellite TV: Remembering Lorain from the Stratosphere,” shown on televisions in the front windows of Union Town Provisions, 422 Broadway.
Singer-songwriter Conner Morehart was scheduled to perform live online April 16 as part of FireFish Festival’s continuing programs this year.
Baumgartner, a Lorain native who moved to California for his work in film and television, said he has nearly completed his documentary about the Aug. 28, 2014, fire that gutted First Lutheran Church at 603 Washington Ave., and the congregation’s process to rebuild at 1019 W. Fifth St.
It will premiere publicly this summer at the Lorain Palace Theater.
Baumgartner said he first experienced FireFish in person for the first time back in Lorain in 2019.
“It was intoxicating, it was really wonderful,” he said.