Grace Merritt came to Iowa City for college and stayed for the vibrant arts scene.
“Growing up, I didn’t have that kind of music community,” she said. “Music in my hometown is like, ‘Do you want to go see the high school’s band?’”
Merritt describes her hometown of Naperville, a western suburb of Chicago, as “very sanitized with art, especially public art, especially art made by people that live there. It’s very much unlike that here. I think that’s why I fell in love with Iowa City. And the Englert really helped introduce me to a lot of those spaces, especially because of Mission Creek.”
Her first experience of Mission Creek Festival was in the spring semester of her freshman year in 2017. Volunteering to write show reviews for KRUI, the University of Iowa’s student-run radio station, Merritt headed to Gabe’s to catch the indie rock band Cloud Nothings.
“It was just really fun and awesome and exciting,” she recalled with a smile.
More than just a memorable show, the experience encouraged her to seek further opportunities with the festival. Merritt started volunteering for Mission Creek in the spring of 2018 and describes seeing Jamila Woods and Julien Baker perform that year as “formative.”
“Watching her [Baker] live loop on stage, I had never seen someone do that; I didn’t know it was possible. I didn’t know you could create such a landscape with one person on stage … It was a whole new level of performance that I encountered that weekend.”
Fast forward to 2025, and Merritt is the programming coordinator for both the Englert Theatre and Mission Creek Festival (April 3-5), and a central figure behind the Iowa City music scene. We traversed the remnants of an especially vicious Iowa winter snowstorm to meet in person at the iconic venue, a place Merritt is deeply appreciative to call her office.
“I also live in a historic home,” she said. “There used to be a pirate radio station in it. There were shows there all the time — an album just released that was recorded there during the pandemic. I really like to surround myself with places that have meant something to people, and being in the Englert, there’s always such good inspiration.”
A trip to the National Independent Venue Association Conference in New Orleans last year was also a source of creativity. Between spontaneous music listening tours of the city — “The whole time I was there, I was like ‘do I have to move to New Orleans?’” — Merritt discussed the joys and demands of organizing an independent music venue. “We all acknowledge that we are doing something that is intentionally harder than it could be. Live Nation does make certain things easier for people, in terms of running a venue, but we all choose a route that we feel supports artists in towns, communities and art better.”
One particularly generative panel at the conference asked attendees to consider whether community members would want to be in their venue if there was nothing going on. “I think about that a lot,” contemplates Merritt. “How do we make this an accessible place where people just think it’s cool to be here when there’s nothing on stage, because I think that’s how you really make a third space happen.” Such a space materialized when Merritt guided Iowa City Flea’s winter migration indoors to the Englert in December. In a clever piece of intertextual marketing, the Mission Creek Festival lineup was announced at the event.
Outside of the blockbuster headliners (Raekwon will continue the lineage of Wu-Tang Clan members visiting Iowa City when he runs through his debut studio album Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…) Merritt is thrilled to bring Guatemalan cellist and vocalist Mabe Fratti to the festival.
“She ranges from being very haunting to very ethereal,” Merritt said. “She really makes a whole soundscape. Her vocals are absolutely gorgeous. That is the one I’m like by far the most excited for, and her going on right before Mannequin Pussy — there’s not another place I would want to be.”
We reflected on other events and people that have shaped the cultural fabric of Iowa City, with an emphasis on Chris Wiersema — a visionary presence in the Iowa City music scene who passed away last year. Gesturing to a Feed Me Weird Things sticker on her notebook, Merritt described Wiersema as her “North Star.”
“Me and Brian Johannesen, who’s the programming director here, talk about him all the time. We ran into an issue the other week with a Mission Creek thing and we just sat and talked about what Chris would do … He was remarkable for what he did here. I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking about him. He was the best.”
We concluded our conversation by discussing the values of the Englert and Mission Creek Festival — arts, community and diversity — in a political landscape increasingly characterized by fear, intolerance and individualism.
“I believe so greatly that the arts are the place [where] you could change people’s minds. The arts are the place where people lower their barriers and are willing to think about something that they wouldn’t have otherwise, or be in conversation with something that they wouldn’t have otherwise,” Merritt said. “I think the arts are the exact antithesis to what’s going on nationally.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s March 2025 issue.
