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Curator Samantha Katz’s Festival Blueprint for the Post-Spectatorship Era

Becoming Together, a three-day, three-night multidisciplinary cultural festival that unfolded across New Orleans earlier this year, was an intriguing experiment in what can happen when the distance between art and observer narrows.

Curator Samantha Katz, who owns 1:1 Gallery with her husband, the architect Alan Paukman, didn’t necessarily set out to create an arts festival. What she wanted to do was shine a light on the lesser-known cultural output of her adopted city, New Orleans—the culture you find when you look beyond “boobs and beads and Bourbon Street,” as she put it. The result was Becoming Together, a multi-day happening that unfolded across venues earlier this year. What set the weekend apart from a typical arts festival was not its scale, which was decidedly small, or its scope, which encompassed painting and sculpture, live performance, design, sound and food, but its refusal to separate audience from artist. It was, Katz told me, not so much a gathering of works to be passively absorbed but rather a distributed work in its own right in which both spectators and city became co-authors.

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Drawing on New Orleans’ deep-rooted traditions of improvisation and pageantry, Becoming Together assembled a roster of more than 40 local artists spanning visual art, performance and culinary practice, all of whom had a hand in developing a program that moved across distinct New Orleans sites, including Studio 633, Kingsway Mansion, Toulouse Theatre and the deconsecrated chapel at Hotel Peter & Paul. Katz’s role was essentially facilitator: “all I did was create the canvas, but they showed up with such expression and authenticity and creativity,” and each location also had a part in shaping the weekend. Every day had its own dress code and thematic lens, through which participants—all invitees at this edition of Becoming Together—could express themselves, contribute or otherwise weave themselves into the festival’s fabric.

Observer spoke with Katz about why models of cultural engagement that favor participation over spectatorship feel increasingly urgent, what it took to hold space for collaborators across five disparate programs and whether Becoming Together could become an annual event in New Orleans or something she adapts to other cities.

For those who weren’t there, how would you describe what “Becoming Together” actually was?

It was a three-day, three-night art festival that really served as a living love letter to the city of New Orleans. Each program, of which there were five, focused on a different medium. Night one was a visual art exhibition. Day two was a culinary pop-up. Night two was a five-act back-to-back DJ lineup at the historic Toulouse Theatre, which has a history of hosting every famous act you can think of, from Lady Gaga to Charli XCX to........

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