Mission Creek Festival’s namesake is a ghost river in San Francisco. It once connected the center of the city to Mission Bay, though during the past two centuries it has largely been filled in and redirected through subterranean channels. Over the years, parts of the land that Mission Creek ran through have experienced soil liquefaction, most dramatically during the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, when the four-story Valencia Street Hotel sank halfway into the ground.
What an apt metaphor for this groundbreaking Iowa City institution: a partially submerged structure existing in the liminal space between sunshine and the underground. This year, Mission Creek Festival (April 3-5) celebrates its 20th anniversary — a humble reminder to your friendly neighborhood Little Village columnist that time really does fly.
Feature on Mission Creek Festival in Little Village issue 63, March 2007.
The fifth anniversary of MCF in Little Village issue 90 (pictured, clockwise: Sarah Cram Driscoll, Dustin Busch, Andre Perry, Connor Wyrick, Sam Locke Ward, Chris Wiersema and Josh Carroll) March 2010.
The first one to take place in Iowa City was held from March 29 to April 1, 2006, and it featured a cool mix of bands, literary readings and other arts events that would come to define the fest.
Jeff Ray founded the original Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival in San Francisco with the goal of spotlighting the Bay Area’s more marginal artists and musicians, and he eventually invited Andre Perry to get involved as a producer.
When Perry decided to go back to school to pursue an MFA in writing, he planned to either stay in San Francisco or move to New York City — until fate intervened. “Kind of on a whim,” he said, “I applied to University of Iowa, and then got into Iowa. Then I started to take it seriously, visited Iowa City for 24 hours and had a great time, so I decided to come here.”
As Perry was wrapping up his life in San Francisco, Ray planted the seed in his mind that maybe Mission Creek could expand to Iowa City, and that Perry should investigate. After arriving in the summer of 2005, the Iowa City transplant began attending shows at the Mill and other local venues. Pretty quickly he realized that yes, maybe this can work.
“From there, I met Tanner Illingworth,” Perry said. “He was in school at that time at Iowa. At the end of that fall, we were asking each other, ‘Should we do that thing?’ And then we were like, ‘Let’s do that thing!’ So, we went to Doug Roberson at Gabe’s, Trevor Lee Hopkins at the Mill, and the Englert.”
“Doug and Trevor immediately understood, even though we didn’t totally understand what we were asking. They were like, ‘That’s a thing you need to do, and it would be good for our scene,’ and the Englert was like, ‘Please leave our building immediately.’” He laughed. “There were a lot of other people who were just supportive as advocates, like Katie Roche [former Englert development director], because I was a new kid on the block.”
After the nascent promoters didn’t completely lose their shirts, they decided to do it again. And again, and again, until the festival had woven its way into the fabric of Iowa City life. Every year when winter thaws into spring, hundreds of people wait in anticipation for Mission Creek to take over the town. Over the years, it has hosted shows and readings in traditional venues and off-the-beaten-path spaces, like the second floor of the Deadwood, which was like entering a forgotten realm. (Who knew that there was an upstairs at the Deadwood???)
Mission Creek remained underground during its first three years. It surfaced in a major way in 2009 when the Wu-Tang Clan’s GZA headlined a show at the Englert, which had opened its doors to the festival and soon became Mission Creek’s primary institutional home. Perry was hired as the theater’s executive director in 2010, and he now serves as the executive director of Hancher Auditorium and UI’s Office of Performing Arts and Engagement — when not working as an executive assistant and life coach for two cute Iowa City kids.
That 2009 festival was a pivotal moment, and made a deep impression. For those who were at the Mill, the sold-out Mountain Goats show with John Vanderslice will forever be imprinted on their minds, and the same can be said of a basement house show where Zola Jesus performed. Likewise, some people were changed inalterably after they squeezed into a little room in the basement of the Jefferson Building to see the Swedish singer-songwriter Kristian Matsson perform as The Tallest Man On Earth.
“On a personal level, in my own musical evolution, it was very eye-opening,” recalled the Englert’s current programming director Brian Johannesen. “There were like a hundred people dripping sweat in this tiny room, and I was sitting cross-legged, right in front of the stage. And Kristian has this weird stage presence where he loves to challenge you, so the guitar was in my face and I was shooting video on a crappy camcorder, just shaking. It was just incredible, the vibe was amazing.”
That was also the first year I got involved. I programmed a handful of cultural events for Mission Creek Festival, starting with a lecture by Harry Allen, better known as Public Enemy’s Media Assassin. The next year, I invited Allen and founding PE members Chuck D, Hank Shocklee and Keith Shocklee to discuss the 20th anniversary of Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet. It was part of a UI Museum of Art exhibition that I co-curated with Deborah Whaley, “Two Turntables and a Microphone,” and the panel discussion at the Englert was packed to the gills and buzzing with energy.
The artists stopped by KRUI for a half-hour on-air discussion of Public Enemy’s legacy, and the Bomb Squad performed an incendiary show in the Yacht Club later that night. I remember Harry Allen telling me that Iowa was his new favorite place, though he was bummed we didn’t have time to visit the future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk (all of PE are self-professed sci-fi nerds).
“That Public Enemy event was so life affirming,” Perry recalled. “I still remember them going into detail about how they made ‘Fight the Power,’ which is one of the most brilliant pieces of music ever, and how Chuck D created a message for that time, one that is still timeless. Hearing them talk about making their art was instructive, and it showed us how we can move through the world creatively.”
This year’s festival features the return of Neko Case, who will be giving a reading at UI’s Voxman Music Building from her new memoir after tearing the roof off Hancher last year. Case is one of many who will be coming back to Iowa City this spring, like Kim Gordon (who I helped bring to Mission Creek in 2011 for a conversation with Thurston Moore at the Englert and a performance at the Mill with Moore and percussionist Chris Corsano). Gordon will be returning in 2025 to facilitate a conversation with acclaimed novelist and essayist Rachel Kushner.
“I think the way the lineup came together this year is great for the 20th anniversary,” Johannesen said. “It really hits on all the different facets of Mission Creek Festival — so there’s punk and the harder stuff, there’s hip-hop, there’s experimental music and other stuff all balanced really well together. I’m also very, very excited about all the different callbacks to the people who have helped make Mission Creek what it is throughout the years, like bringing Will Whitmore back, who has been just a force for Iowa music.”
Other pillars of Mission Creek only exist as traces and memories, including beloved venues like the Mill, which was demolished in 2022. Closer to the heart are the losses of Trevor Lee Hopkins and Chris Wiersema, two promoters that formed the backbone of the Iowa City music scene and have unexpectedly died in the past two years. Nevertheless, their vision and energy continue to reverberate through the community.
In many ways, the arc of Mission Creek Festival reflects the growth of the town’s major cultural institutions during the same period. FilmScene, for example, grew from a mere idea to a series of events in partnership with the Englert, and then into a multiscreen cinema with five screens across two buildings. Likewise, in that timespan, Public Space One went from essentially squatting in an unused university basement room in the Jefferson Building — where that Tallest Man On Earth show took place — to owning and occupying three historic downtown houses, including the Close House mansion on Gilbert Street.
From the Englert and PS1 to KRUI and the mysterious second floor of the Deadwood, attending Mission Creek was like being guided through a secret history of Iowa City. Over the past two decades, it has kept Iowa spiritually healthy by feeding its population a smorgasbord of weird and wonderful things, and for that I will be forever grateful.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s March 2025 issue.
