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Putting the Art in Heartland | Urban Plains

Putting the Art in Heartland

This is just one of the nine small photographs that artist Jami Milne left around the city for Des Moines’ inaugural Free Art Friday.

This is just one of the nine small photographs that artist Jami Milne left around the city for Des Moines’ inaugural Free Art Friday.

The Free Art Friday movement in Des Moines encourages the appreciation—-and creation—-of artwork

Words by Taylor Eisenhauer
Photos courtesy of Jami Milne

On a warm Friday in June, local artist Jami Milne peppered Des Moines with nine small wooden blocks, each emblazoned with its own photograph. She leaned one with a slightly rumpled—but still hanging—American flag against the leg of a street-side USPS mailbox. She placed another featuring a flamingo in Paris on the step of a pale pink door. She even left one depicting a horse sculpture made of driftwood on the ledge of a handwritten sign that read “No art festival parking.” These blocks were Milne’s contribution to Des Moines’ inaugural Free Art Friday.

U.K.-based artist My Dog Sighs created Free Art Friday in 2006. His concept, dropping your art for someone else to find, has become a global movement, spreading to the U.S. in cities like Santa Barbara, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit and Austin. And now Des Moines is on that list, thanks to Sarah Fisch.

After seeing her brother participate in Atlanta’s Free Art Friday, graphic designer Fisch and her boyfriend, Trenton Chesling, thought such a movement would be a great fit for Des Moines’ art scene. “We wanted to catch the eye of all the great artists around here and make their art easy for people to see and to access – maybe get a piece of it,” Fisch said. “We have a lot of great up-and-coming artists, and we hoped they could use this as way to get their names out there even more.”

The couple scheduled the first Free Art Friday to begin the same weekend as the Des Moines Arts Festival, a multi-day celebration of central Iowa arts in June. To help spread the word, Fisch and Chesling created a Facebook page, an Instagram account and the movement’s hashtag for the Des Moines area: #fafdsm.

Anyone can walk around Des Moines, a place Fisch referred to as a “small big city,” and happen upon these works of art. But those who want to actively participate in Des Moines’ Free Art Friday can follow the hashtag to find out where artists are dropping their pieces, which range from photographs to drawings to paintings. There’s no shortage of variety.

“There are so many different forms of art, and there are so many people doing it here locally that have such great talent,” said Addison Bratvold, marketing and PR manager for the Greater Des Moines Convention and Visitors Bureau. “I think [Free Art Friday] just opens up a lot of people to appreciating [that] and taking pride in the local art scene.”

Bratvold and the Visitors Bureau decided to join the fun and do their own Free Art Friday drop after running across Fisch’s social media campaign. “Greater Des Moines has such a vibrant arts and culture scene, and we wanted to play a role in that and participate,” Bratvold said. “We partner with local artists for different projects throughout the year anyway, so we utilized some of the artwork we partnered with them on.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/BJT3ZKTA2O4/

Fisch and Chesling were more than happy to partner with the Bureau.

“We gained a lot of followers [after that], and it garnered a lot of interest,” Fisch said. She hopes Des Moines’ Free Art Friday will be as popular as the movement is in larger cities like Atlanta.

For that to happen, artists have to continue creating work every week. And in Fisch’s mind, anybody and everybody can be an artist. “You don’t have to be making big, extravagant pieces,” she said. “You don’t have to consider yourself an artist, you don’t have to be creative. It’s just a fun way to express yourself.”

Milne had no reservations about sharing these photographs, her first contributions to Free Art Friday, around the city. “I know that feeling of stumbling upon some sort of little treasure,” she said.

Milne had no reservations about sharing these photographs, her first contributions to Free Art Friday, around the city. “I know that feeling of stumbling upon some sort of little treasure,” she said.

And that’s why Milne, who left the advertising world to focus on her art full time, didn’t have to think twice about sharing the experience with her 7-year-old son after leaving her pieces around Des Moines during Free Art Friday’s debut weekend. She and her son ventured out on another Friday to place a picture he’d drawn of a cat on a park bench for someone to find. “[It’s] just a way of teaching younger individuals that it’s okay to make stuff and let it go to the world in hopes that it will brighten someone’s day,” she said.

For Milne, the sense of pride created by the movement and all the participating artists—both young and old—is really what stands out. “You start to see other artists take note and think, ‘I want to give people things for free, too,’ and that’s an amazing community to be a part of.”

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