Sault Ste. Marie’s Summer Moon Festival has been nominated for this year’s top festival in the province by Attractions Ontario.
Voting for the Ontario’s Choice Awards will take place on the organization's website until Sept. 11.
Josh Ingram, special events and sports tourism coordinator for the City of Sault Ste. Marie, says that 2022 marked the first year organizers were able to offer festival-goers a full slate of events after being hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think by and large, it was really strong,” said Ingram of this year's edition of the arts and culture festival. “We did more collaborations with local arts and cultural locations than we ever had — and it’s easy to say that, but in all fairness we’ve never done full-on festival programming, it’s always been the murals.”
This year’s Summer Moon Festival featured The Loft Workshop Series, which consisted of interdisciplinary artist workshops where the public could learn about podcasting, songwriting and other mediums. The five-day event was capped off with musical performances by Shad, Snotty Nose Rez Kids and Skratch Bastid.
Ingram says the artist workshops were a big draw during the June festival, easily exceeding projected attendance figures.
Going forward, Ingram says that festival-goers should expect to see more diversity when it comes to art as organizers seek to expand beyond the large-scale murals that served as the centrepiece of the festival in years past.
“I think that you can look forward to seeing some culinary pieces tied into the experience,” said Ingram. “I think you’ll absolutely see more events to help fill out the roster throughout the day.”
Regardless of how Summer Moon Festival fares as a finalist for top festival in the Ontario’s Choice Awards, Ingram hopes that organizers use the nod from Attractions Ontario for branding purposes in the future.
“We all know that Sault Ste. Marie is beautiful and Algoma has incredible things to offer, but a lot of people don’t because they don’t think of northern Ontario as a tourism destination or something that has premier talent - but I think it’s fair to say that we all know that’s not true,” he said. “Hopefully people that are considering coming to Summer Moon Festival next year will see that it was nominated in this category for a provincial award and they’ll say, ‘hey if they’re worthy of the nomination, it’s worthy to check out ourselves,’ so I’m kind of hoping that will happen there.”