The sun has set on Northern Spark. The nonprofit behind the annual dusk-to-dawn arts festival announced Monday that it no longer has the funding to keep staging the free fest and is shutting down.
"It's not only a COVID story. It's not only a leadership change story. It's not only a long-term shift away from arts funding story," said Sarah Peters, executive director of the St. Paul-based Northern Lights.mn. "It's a confluence of all of those things."
The organization, which began in 2008, won't put on another festival this summer, but it will hold a closing ceremony in June and will craft a tribute publication.
The first fun, frenzied Northern Spark took place in 2011, modeled on the nuit blanche or "white night" festival of arts and culture in Paris that stretches from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. It kept that format until 2018, when it straddled two nights.
Co-director and founder Steve Dietz left the organization in 2019.
On Peters' first day as director, in 2020, Gov. Tim Walz announced a stay-at-home order in response the rise in COVID-19 cases. After a year off, the festival became a two-week-long series of events in 2021, a structure modeled for COVID times.
But a slimmed-down version of the all-nighter returned last summer.
"So we set to work planning for a 2023 festival that would be at this new scale," Peters said. "The grant and resources just did not come through, even at that reduced scale."
