Forty mural artists and 20 bands have taken over the streets and alleyways of Milo-Grogan this weekend as 934 Fest marks its 10th anniversary, running Friday night into Saturday from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. The free festival, centered on Cleveland Avenue, has grown from a scrappy neighborhood fundraiser into one of Columbus's most distinctive showcases of public art and independent music.
The festival kicked off Friday evening with a three-hour set of live music before expanding Saturday into its full-day lineup, according to WSYX. This year's edition lands exactly a decade after 934 Gallery first launched the event as an annual fundraising and community showcase, a milestone confirmed by Experience Columbus. The festival's physical footprint stretches well beyond the gallery itself at 934 Cleveland Avenue, extending into the neighboring historic Milo Arts building at 617 East 3rd Avenue and the surrounding alleyways, which the event transforms into an open-air mural corridor, according to reporting from The Lantern.
A Stage Named for the Festival's Co-Founder
934 Fest was co-founded by local artist Daniel Loper to support Columbus musicians, and the festival's main stage now carries his name permanently, the Daniel Loper Main Stage, in memory of Loper following his death by suicide, as Columbus Calling reports. Early volunteer musicians reportedly built the festival's original stage by hand specifically to give local acts a place to perform, according to the same account.
Admission remains free with only a suggested donation, and the festival features merchandise, craft beer, and food truck sales, The Lantern notes. The gallery offers year-round programming.
Guaranteed Pay for Artists and Musicians
Since 2023, 934 Gallery has run a #PayArtists initiative that guarantees financial stipends to every exhibiting visual artist and participating festival musician, regardless of whether their work sells, according to 934 Gallery. The gallery says it has distributed more than $115,000 to artists since 2015, funding part of those stipends through #PayArtists merchandise sales.
The gallery itself dates back to 2015, when artist volunteers connected to Milo Arts converted a former auto repair shop on Cleveland Avenue into a 2,700-square-foot contemporary art space, per The Lantern's account of the gallery's history. Next door, the Milo Arts campus occupies an 1894 former elementary school that was converted into live-work artist housing in 1988, making it Columbus's longest-standing live-work sanctuary and home to nearly 40 artists, according to Milo Arts. That schoolhouse was originally built by Milo residents before the town was annexed into Columbus, the organization notes.
Art Rooted in a Neighborhood Still Rebuilding
Milo-Grogan was originally settled as two distinct rail-and-industrial towns in the late 1870s, and the neighborhood now faces a 45 percent poverty rate following decades of factory closures and the construction of Interstate 71 in the 1960s, which physically bisected the community and cut it off from surrounding commercial districts, according to a report from the Finance Fund. In 2018, the City of Columbus designated Milo-Grogan and the Cleveland Avenue corridor as a federal Qualified Opportunity Zone, a status meant to incentivize real estate and commercial investment through 2028 by offering capital gains tax incentives to developers in economically distressed census tracts, per Opportunity Zones GIS Open Data.
This month, 934 Gallery also partnered with the Shot Tower Gallery at Fort Hayes to present Outside In, a satellite pop-up exhibition featuring gallery-scale works from 20 current and former 934 Fest muralists, according to 934 Gallery. The off-site show highlights the festival's ten-year legacy of public street art, the gallery says, extending this year's anniversary celebration beyond Milo-Grogan itself.
