The Music Box Village finds new home!

The Music Box Village is one of the coolest and most unique events/community/dreams in New Orleans to date. Started in 2011 while resting in place in a Bywater backyard, The Music Box, produced by the not-for-profit collective New Orleans Airlift, was the most talked about event/experience of last year. Hosted inside City Park in 2015, The Music Village have finally found a permanent place they can call home. Now with over 55,000 square feet to work with and the space and tools etc to make it all come to fruition, they need our help to continue making magic. With that said, it takes a village (punny huh?) to make the magic happen. So, the team decided to start a funding project via Kickstarter and they need our help. In less than 48 hours, the project will end. I spent some time, a few weeks ago, in their new huge space, with the folks behind it all. I was so blown away by the creativity and ingenuity that embodies their village. Check out the details behind their calling and help them reach their stretch goal today! 

“The Music Box is a place where play, imagination, experimentation, collaboration, community and tons of hard work come together as artist-made, interactive “musical houses.” They can be cacophonously played by the public, or harmoniously performed by professional musicians.

The Music Box is an internationally celebrated and locally loved public art project, inspired by the unique musical and architectural culture of our home city of New Orleans. The project pushes artistic boundaries, but more importantly it brings together people of all stripes for a heartwarming, creative experience that has equal appeal for a musical giant such as Thurston Moore or a gaggle of 5-year-olds. 

Now, we’re giving The Music Box a permanent home: The Music Box Village. After building and tearing down several temporary versions, it has been our long-held dream to install our musical houses in a place where we can continue to elaborate on and improve the project, while it grows with its community. 

The project is the evolving brainchild of our nonprofit arts organization New Orleans Airlift. Begun in 2011 by local artists Delaney Martin, Taylor Shepherd, Jay Pennington and visiting artist Swoon, the project has grown mightily since its inception through the hard work and idiosyncratic vision of hundreds more collaborators to date.

Many of you have been with us along this journey for the past five years, since our original Music Box project which featured 25 artists and another 50 performing musicians. Since then, we have worked with dozens more amazing artists, musicians, inventors, architects, youth participants and many more voices for this radically collaborative project. The project has visited other cities in the U.S. such as Tampa and Shreveport, and even gone to Kiev, Ukraine.

Most recently, in 2015, we presented The Music Box: Roving Village in a six-week installation in City Park, which attracted over ten thousand visitors and featured Wilco, Solange Knowles, William Parker, Arto Lindsay, Preservation Hall, the Lost Bayou Ramblers, Tank & the Bangas and more of our favorite musicians, both locally and internationally acclaimed. Nearly 2,000 students have visited The Music Box for interactive workshops, while roughly 30,000 visitors have created joyous noise with us over the lifespan of the project. 

Our hundreds of Kickstarter supporters have made these projects possible. We will continue to work with local and international creators, providing paid opportunities for artists, builders and performers, as we deepen the meaning and the possibilities of musical architecture for our broader community.”