Sussex County Teen Arts

Project

Sussex County Teen Arts Festival is an annual creative showcase of Middle School & High School artwork in NJ. In 2021 the festival couldn’t meet in person due to Covid-19. The challenge was to design an online festival experience that showcased student artwork and brought together the local artistic community.

Key challenges:

• How do we honor the medium of all artwork in a digital location/format?

• How can the festival engage viewers and the community in a new way?

• Since students won’t get in-person feedback on their artwork, how can bring that element virtually?

Needed to Feature:

• 9 Schools

• 300+ Students

• 400+ Artwork Submissions across fine art, poetry, writing, music, film, and performance.

results

The virtual festival exceeded the communities expectations! Families and schools expressed deep gratitude that the festival brought so much joy to a school year where so many events had been cancelled.

About 1-2k visitors attend the weekend long in-person festival annually, while the website saw over 3,000 visitors and over 12,000 page views in that period of time. The virtual festival also brought Teen Arts to a global community, it enabled student’s family members that live across the country and world to attend Teen Arts and support their student in their artistic endeavors. We had viewers from 30 USA states and 10 additional countries attend the virtual festival.

A key purpose of Teen Arts Festival is that students receive feedback on their artwork from their peers and community. To bring that same spirit to the virtual festival we set up applause forms throughout the website. Viewers could send a positive note to an artist and compliment their work. We received over 400 notes! The feedback was then shared with the students.