“The experience is quite different than simply looking at a static piece of art on a wall,” explains John Featherstone, who conceived the idea and worked with more than 100 creatives to make it happen.
Two of Featherstone’s daughters attended ASU, which got him wondering how students with the school’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts would fare during the pandemic. He’s well-versed in visual culture, as a partner and principal with an international lighting, media, and visual design firm called Lightswitch.
“Museums, theme parks, concert halls, and immersive experiences were all getting cut off from the knees,” he recalls of early COVID-19 days. “I realized that a whole bunch of students might not be getting experiences in the real world the way they had before, and some might graduate without doing a show or having a portfolio.”