Each year, on an afternoon in April, Ann Arborites gather to watch giant papier-mache creatures and creations dance down Main Street.
FestiFools, an annual outdoor spectacle produced through a University of Michigan art course, has been delighting and puzzling passersby for nearly two decades.
“There’ll be lots of people who come out and go, ‘What is this?’ or ‘Why are you doing this?’ and it’s just delightful to not have any clue,” says Mark Tucker, MFA’85, the course instructor and art director of FestiFools. “It just keeps changing and evolving and surprising us with the people who come to it, and why they come to it.”
In 2007, Tucker reimagined the winter semester’s focus of the course “Art in Public Spaces” and launched the public art spectacle today known as FestiFools, bringing massive moving sculptures to the streets of Ann Arbor.
The course fulfills a creative expression requirement at the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, and most students enrolled aren’t art majors.
“That’s what makes it really fun to teach is because what do you teach someone who might only take one art class in their college career?” Tucker says.
Some students chose light-hearted concepts, and others aim to express political or social messaging in their designs.
“It’s challenging to be an 18-year-old student and wonder what you can say and can’t say, especially in this climate. … While it’s all joy and fun, as a visual kind of cacophony, there’s serious messages with a lot of pieces,” Tucker says, recognizing that many students are expressing what they’re learning in other courses.
The sculptures include moving elements operated by students and community volunteers, who also help work on the sculptures on the weekends leading up to FestiFools — the papier-mache process alone takes more time than the students will have in the classroom.
Their studio space on the athletic campus is lined with sculptures from years past, including a staggering Elvis face from the first FestiFools that most mistake for Ronald Reagan. But with some figures reaching well over 10 feet tall or 12 feet wide, storage is never a real option.
Instead, the dumpster is a feature of the process rather than the mark of a failure.
“We get to share this out as a gift, and then kind of ritualistically — because we don’t have any room to store this stuff — it all goes into the dumpster,” Tucker says. “So what’s the purpose of something like that?” It’s about the process.
FestiFools has been a quirky feature of Ann Arbor culture for nearly 20 years, and for Tucker, it’s starting to come full circle. Some of his current students were toddlers watching the first FestiFools from the sidewalk. Now, they’re the ones building the sculptures, and still surprising him with new ideas decades later.
“I love this. We love seeing the new students every time. They’re just so interesting, and bring all these crazy new ideas,” Tucker says. “The amount that they teach me, I should be paying tuition.”
Katherine Fiorillo is the senior editor of Michigan Alum.
