Diverse offerings of music, books, film set first-year festival apart
Columbus has a festival for almost everyone. Headbangers can set their ears to ringing at next weekend’s Rock on the Range. Local-music lovers can wind their way through Comfest. Jazz fans can savor the Jazz & Rib Fest. Hip-hop listeners can head to 2x2 Fest.
This year, the Flyover Fest joins the ranks as the buffet option for anyone too eclectic to choose a single entree.
With a book-and-music fair, film screenings and a set of panel discussions — and a variety of concerts — the three-day arts celebration takes its inspiration from Mission Creek Festival in Iowa City, Iowa.
Eric Obenauf, Flyover co-founder and the editorial director of local publishing firm Two Dollar Radio, has trekked out to Mission Creek
— a six-day event packed with musical events and literary readings — for the past three years. He sensed a community spirit there that reminded him of the enthusiasm for the arts back home.
“What I really appreciate about Columbus is that people don’t always wear their art on their sleeve,” he said, “but you start talking to them and it’s like ‘Oh, you’re a sculptor.’ “
Obenauf, with fellow founders Justin McIntosh, Tom Konitzer and Brett Gregory, pondered putting on a festival for the past two years before making plans public in early March.
Konitzer, owner of Outer Orbit Booking and the festival music curator, said help came pouring in to support the four inexperienced festival planners.
A grant from the Greater Columbus Arts Council — plus partnerships with Wild Goose Creative, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams — are backing Flyover.
“Ever since announcing, we’ve had multiple people reach out (with) things we didn’t even think of,” Konitzer said.
Designed to be walkable, most events are concentrated on the North Side between the Ohio State University campus and the Clintonville neighborhood.
A variety of music genres will be featured.
On Friday, rockers Dirty Dishes join local rapper Correy Parks, plus poet Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, at Spacebar.
And on Saturday, a Columbus-centric lineup features rappers Dominique Larue and Vada Azeem and punkrock band Connections, plus writers Sarah Gerard of New York and Juliet Escoria of Beckley, West Virginia, also at Spacebar.
(An additional Saturday concert, taking place at Rambling House Soda for those with all-inclusive passes, includes Zac Little of Saintseneca, Dolfish and Scott McClanahan.)
Larue has played plenty of area festivals — she coheadlined Comfest last year and played at Independents’ Day in 2015 — but hasn’t performed at an event with such a freewheeling arts focus.
The varying ages, genders and races among entertainers don’t hurt either, she said.
“It’s very inclusive,”
Larue said. “I definitely appreciate that as a black woman.”
She understands the value of upstart events such as Flyover in boosting public image, especially when such different demographics rub elbows.
Obenauf made a priority of finding a wide array of performers.
“As an editor,” he said, “it’s something you’re always cognizant of, giving a platform to everyone.”
While all other events are ticketed, a free book-and-music fair
on Saturday is expected to bring in a host of publishers from across the country (and one from Canada), plus local music publishers Anyway Records, Cabin Floor Esoterica and Superdreamer Records.
Flyover opens Thursday evening at the Wexner Center for the Arts when Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Amber Hunt discusses her crime podcast “Accused.” Afterward, the documentary “The Central Park Five,” a look at the 1989 rape of a female jogger and the wrongful convictions of five black and Latino teenagers that followed, will be screened.
The film series continues at the Wexner Center on Friday with “Polyphonic Portraits of a New America” — an exploration of the country’s increasingly deep-seated divisions — and Saturday with the Found Footage Festival, a humorous mashup of VHS tapes.
The cross-pollination of artistic endeavors proves that Columbus is much more than flyover country, co-founder Gregory said.
“I don’t think we wanted to put on a festival just to put on a festival,” he said.