Summerfest grant winner unites the community with art

Participants at Summerfest typically flock outside a booth to examine art, look at the price tag, then count out the cash — except for fine arts graduate student Mikey Kettinger’s booth.

Participants lined up in the summer heat outside Kettinger’s booth June 18-20 not to buy art, but to make it — then give it away to a stranger more than 2,000 miles away.

“It was really confusing to people,” Kettinger said. “They didn’t get it. They were like, ‘Why would you be here if you aren’t selling anything?'”

Kettinger’s booth was the final step of his Summerfest at Tabernacle Square Grant project. In return for his $875 grant, Kettinger created his community-infused, Cache Valley Gift campaign.

For months, Kettinger placed boxes in stores, parks, trails and museums all over Logan. He encouraged participants to leave handcrafted gifts, including poetry, water-color paintings and drawings with the tools provided at each location.

“We would get a lot of kid-like drawings of their parents and families,” said Zach Shepherd, a Directive board shop employee, the location with the most art donations.

But the point was to not collect great works of art, Kettinger said. The point was to show that anyone can make art, no matter the skill level.

“It can feel good to make art, and it can be a nice thing to make art for reasons other than selling it,” he said.

At the end of the project, every piece of art will be sent more than 2,000 miles away to Mark Zimmerman in Jacksonville, Florida.

From there, Kettinger said it’s up to Zimmerman to decide where the art goes.

“I’m actually really, really excited to see what he comes up,” he said. “I’m just going to tell him what happened and I’m sure he is just going to blow our minds with whatever he comes up with.”

Kettinger said he knows Zimmerman through a similar campaign Kettinger began in Jacksonville.

Back then, Kettinger was a college student with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts living Jacksonville. His art was selling, but Kettinger wasn’t satisfied.

“I feel like my process got corrupted at some point because instead of being the most interesting and the most progressive, I started to make things because I thought that’s would people would buy,” he said.

Concerned about how this make-to-sell-art lifestyle would affect him, Kettinger said he turned to other artists.

“I saw a lot of people around me that were only making art to sell it, and they were completely miserable,” Kettinger said. “They had lost all their joy for making it. I just thought, ‘I don’t want to be that person at all.'”

And so Kettinger said he made the decision that would change his life. Instead of making art to sell, he created the kind of art he enjoyed, without a price tag.

He said not long after he decided to make art for his enjoyment and not a profit, Utah State University invited him to study in Logan as a fine arts graduate student.

“There’s irony there, that I stopped selling my art as a means of income and the next thing I know, I’m getting scholarships from USU and grants from Summerfest,” Kettinger said.

For his Summerfest project, Kettinger used re-purposed old briefcases and tackle boxes instead of cardboard boxes like he did in Jacksonville, but the intent on the project was the same — anyone can create art.

“I didn’t want it to be imitating, because a lot people would see art work that looks good and they’ll think, ‘Well, I don’t want to make anything that will be compared to this,'” Kettinger said. “So, a lot of the time, I would make things look more modest. Like a very simple brief case.”

Kettinger’s different approach Summerfest executive director Elaine Thatcher said she always looks for projects with community involvement, and this project offered a different way to accomplish that.

“We liked it because It was fun. It was kind of whimsical, and it invited everyone to be an artist,” Thatcher said.

But it also invited thieves. One of the boxes, located at the Denzil Stewart Nature Park was stolen only a few days after it was placed.

To Kettinger, that only contributed to the mystery of the project.

“But that’s part of (the art project), too. I accept the responsibility for that, because then I’m left to wonder, what happens to it if it does disappear?”