Mission Creek Festival - April 2, 2025

Twenty Years of Mission Creek

Passes still on sale for this weekend!

Let's Celebrate Twenty Years of Mission Creek!

Read below for a message from our Festival Director, Brian Johannesen, about what Mission Creek means to him, and how it has bolstered arts in Iowa City. If you're a longtime local, or an out-of-towner, this festival mean something to everyone. Thank you for being a part of it!

Twenty-one years ago, the first ever YouTube video was uploaded. It was titled “Me at the zoo” and it was a short, 19 second low-quality snippet of YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of a couple elephants. He simply states that he is at the zoo in front of the elephants, “and the cool thing about these guys is that they have really really really long trunks. And that’s pretty much all there is to say."

It’s funny how laid-back Karim is in the video - completely unaware of the ripple effects this test balloon would have on the worlds of technology, communication, creative expression, news media, music, art, and so on and so on. This 25-year-old, standing on the brink of a paradigm shift, goofing around with his friends, pouring his energy into creating something he wanted to see exist, perhaps dreaming of our interconnected futures, perhaps just enjoying the work of discovery for its own sake. Probably both, but in “Me at the zoo” I can’t help but lap up the naive energy that could define the rise of YouTube - the idea that making something that is your own and sharing it with the world is reward enough.

Less than a year after “Me at the zoo” was uploaded, the first Mission Creek Festival took place in Iowa City. Based on the Mission Creek Music & Arts Festival in the Bay Area of California, and with the help of its founder Jeff Ray, MCF Midwest co-founders Andre Perry and Tanner Illingworth dreamed up a loose plan to try to introduce a version of Mission Creek Music & Arts Festival to Iowa City. After some encouraging conversations with Trevor Lee Hopkins (talent buyer at The Mill) and Doug Roberson (talent buyer at The Picador) they pooled their bank accounts together to give it a shot.

They may not have known it at the time (or maybe they did), but it was a paradigm shift for Iowa City. It was the big bang for a community of art lovers, authors, musicians, visual artists, chefs, college kids, townies, professors, professionals, and anyone in between who was curious, open-minded, and down to experience something new. At the moment, they were just showing people the cool thing about these elephants. In the long term, it changed the way Iowa City experienced art and community, and made Iowa City a home, whether literal or figurative, for so many creators and aficionados.

On a personal level, I have been involved in Mission Creek since 2010. I have been a show producer, an artist, an airport runner, a marketer, a fundraiser, the Community Programming Manager and for the last four years the Festival Director. Throughout those years the format, influences, and structure of the festival have changed. It went from two days to eight (!) days back down to three. The programmatic voices have changed. The mediums have changed. But the spirit has stayed the same. The drive to elevate independent art has never wavered.

It’s hard to put twenty years in context. It feels like my brain can’t really comprehend that span of time. It’s existed for over half of my life (and I am one of the old guys in this scene!). Many of the best memories I have were made (and potentially forgotten) at Mission Creek. I am not alone in this feeling, and I am sure many of you reading this email right now have those special Creeky moments that rattle around your brain regularly. We probably have some in common. And that’s what building community through art is. That’s what twenty years of Mission Creek means to me.

I remember sitting at Public Space ONE, back when it was in the basement of the Jefferson Building, cross legged and sweating, watching a young Swedish songwriter break a string a foot in front of my face. He stomped the ground and the crowd gasped as the Christmas lights nobody realized weren’t lit anymore miraculously came on. The artist, a young Tallest Man On Earth, didn’t know it happened but he reveled in the revelry.

I taped the show on a crappy, cheap camcorder with a shaky hand. I uploaded it on this new website that allowed people to share videos with each other. They were some of the first publicly available recordings of songs off his upcoming album The Wild Hunt and garnered tens of thousands of views.

The Tallest Man On Earth will play The Englert Theatre in about two weeks and that feels about right. The artists carry on, the town turns over and people go on to do amazing things in their lives. Mission Creek will continue to evolve, and though The Englert Theatre will no longer be producing the festival, it will remain the beating, independent heart of our arts scene, and I can’t wait to see where it goes next.

Thanks for joining us in the celebration this weekend. We are damn proud of the work we’ve all put into this festival, and will be right there along with you in the crowd, slack-jawed at our new favorite bands, singing along with our old favorites. See you out there.

Brian Johannesen
Festival Director

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