Missing local art? Jump online for Virtual Final Friday
Your fingers versus your legs will have to do the work for you for April’s Virtual Final Friday art crawl.
The Wichita art community’s tradition, ongoing since 1997 either on the first or final Friday each month, will be online on Friday, April 24. Artists from the greater Wichita area who handcraft or design their art are invited to post photos on an event page beginning at 5 p.m., and organizers hope the public will visit the page to see the latest from their favorite artists or discover new makers during the 6 to 8 p.m. time block.
Final Friday is primarily an art show; the art being shown may or may not be for sale. To find the event page, go to Facebook and type “Virtual Final Friday.” If you’re only seeing details of the event, you’re likely on the “About” tab and need to click on “Discussion.” Artists’ posts will be within the “Discussion” section.
Javan Andrew of J. Andrew Designs and Janelle King, owner of The Workroom, are working together to coordinate the event to give artists and the public a familiar platform to connect while COVID-19 disrupts normal operations.
Andrew, who makes and sells men’s and women’s jewelry and other accessories, organized a Virtual Final Friday in March and you can still see that event on Facebook as well. There were about 25 posts from artists, each sharing a collection of images of their work and most including a short statement. If the art was for sale, prices were listed or contact information provided (website, social media handles, email address).
King has organized several online events to sell merchandise and to highlight local artwork for sale since she had to close the doors at her Douglas Design District store and suspend the seasonal opening of her 2nd Saturday Artisan Market. This is the seventh year for the monthly markets, so she has a good following for the events and a large mailing list to reach people.
Earlier this month, King put on a virtual version of the artisan market. Instead of a block full of booths and live music, she had artists post their items on Facebook and she also posted videos of performances that local musicians created for the event.
Andrew said King’s artisan market drew double the artists and possibly two to three times more traffic than his first virtual Final Friday, judging from online visitors who checked the box as “attending” on Facebook.
“We’re hoping if we pair together, we can have a bigger turnout for this Final Friday,” Andrew said. “One great thing that we both saw through our events so far are artists we don’t normally see at the farmers markets or 2nd Saturdays,” Andrew said. “People who are kind of nervous to invest in going out to an event, with an online event it’s free and they can just get online and do it.”
A collective of Wichita artists known as The Famous Dead Artists pioneered Wichita’s version of the monthly gallery crawls in the late 1990s after similar events popped up in larger cities such as Kansas City. They started as a night for visual artists to keep their studios open later than usual to give the public time to stop in for a casual tour and to get to know local artists.
In the past decade, Final Friday became a mainstream cultural event for Wichitans as the event widened its scope. You can find a number of non-traditional art venues across Wichita participating along with the city’s galleries and museums. Restaurants, bars, breweries, retail shops and office buildings have been among the places that often use the monthly art crawl as the opening of a new exhibition.
Performance artists also started to time street performances with the monthly events, including musicians and Phlox, a local group of fire performers. In Fall 2019, the art crawl moved from Final Friday to First Friday, though not all businesses shifted their timing.
This story was originally published April 23, 2020 at 5:01 AM.