A Pop Life Bluesfest Story

If you’ve keeping your ear to the ground recently, you may have heard about an interesting partnership between the Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest and the National Gallery of Canada. I know this may seem like an unlikely pairing but read on … it actually makes sense and we were in the thick of it.

The National Gallery of Canada is launching a very exciting and  controversial new exhibit entitled Pop Life. It focuses on artists like Andy Warhol and Andy Koons that embraced pop culture and leveraged it to great success. The exhibit also includes some pretty risky 18+ content (watch the video at the end of this post and you’ll see what I mean).

Pop life may be one of the most controversial and interesting exhibits to date at the National Gallery and targets a more mainstream market. Reaching bluesfest fans made a lot of sense, especially since plans were under way to launch some music shows in the ByWard market (York Street), just a stone’s throw from the National Gallery. The byward stage was renamed Pop Life Stage on York St. as part of the whole promotion.  

Our role at FaveQuest was to integrate bios, videos and images of the Pop Life artists into the lineup function (Viewtube Social Video Calendar). We added a special tab in the lineup for Pop Life Exhibit and another for the Pop Life Stage on York St. to allow people to explore the exhibit artists as well as the free music on the York St. stage sponsored by Pop Life. The events will be automatically included in the iPhone app we’re launching imminently (developed in collaboration with Select Start Studios) and are also included in the bluesfest calendar widgets embedded in the websites of many Ottawa radio stations (ex: http://www.chez106.com/bluesfest/  ) as well as the Ottawa Citizen.

I promised you the video. This is a walk through of the Pop Life exhibit at the Tate London (be forwarded, there are some explicit images).