Wichita’s Somewhere Festival & Conference Preview: Q&A with Midtopia Co-Founders Jessie and Adam Hartke
Photo courtesy of Somewhere Festival & Conference
On June 13 and 14, Somewhere Festival & Conference will return to Downtown Wichita, Kansas with an expanded program reflecting its setting’s rapid development as a home for artists and trailblazers. With its sophomore staging, following its celebrated debut in 2024 as Elsewhere Festival, the mission-oriented non-profit event presented by Movement Musik and Midtopia will up the ante with a bill of titanic acts across an eclectic mix of genres and styles.
Somewhere Festival’s 2025 lineup is helmed by progressive house icon Deadmau5, chart-climbing Dallas rap pathbreaker BigXThaPlug, alt-pop sensation Suki Waterhouse and legendary shapeshifting producer and multi-hyphenate electronic powerhouse Flying Lotus. Diverse perspectives abound in the undercard, too, with innovators like Aloe Blacc, Die Spitz, Cassian, Tinlicker, Jerro, La Luz, Tommy Newport, Elise Trouw and more filling out the 47-act bill. The myriad artists involved fearlessly cross boundaries independently and disrupt genre entirely as a collective, blurring hip-hop, techno, rock, pop, alternative and more into an intangible musical alloy.
Beyond the music, Somewhere Festival embraces innovation in its Conference, free “Change Starts Somewhere” Block Party, art activations and more. Onstage and off, the event will incorporate AI-driven, cutting-edge production elements and interactive installations that push beyond the proscenium to create an immersive music experience. As a not-for-profit event, Somewhere Festival’s community-focused approach is clear in its partnerships with community organizations like The Phoenix, 1 Million Strong, Learning Lab Wichita, Empower North End, Create Campaign, The Neighboring Movement and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
One day from the festival’s highly anticipated return, Relix spoke with Midtopia co-founders Jessie and Adam Hartke on what makes Somewhere Festival so special and what attendees can expect this year. Learn more about the event and secure your tickets here.
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24 hours out from Somewhere Festival, what’s on your agenda?
Jessie Hartke
Today we’re welcoming panelists for the conference and ensuring setup is in full gear, but we’re getting close to wrapping up the setup.
Adam Hartke
We’re just really putting the final polish on everything. We’ve got all the streets closed down, we’re buttoning up the footprint, making sure it’s tight and safe and secure. You know, we’re just getting all the final pieces that were kind of waiting for the street closures, so tents up in the street, signage and things like that.
J.H.
Last little bits of art activations are going up. We’ve got dinosaurs being placed on containers, so I had a great view last night of a dinosaur being lifted with a forklift. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the shots, but we have like six-foot aluminum dinosaurs that our graffiti crew paints, and the herd roams all over the footprint. So we’re getting it all finely tuned and ready to go for tomorrow.
What’s the scope of the campus for this year’s festival?
J.H.
It’s about a two-square-block radius in Downtown Wichita. We’ve been able to keep it fairly condensed this year. One of the main drivers behind everything Midtopia does, and especially with this festival, is “How do we build community? How do we make this a transformational space for those who are involved?” And our thought was, “How do we keep this accessible, and have it just sort of feel like a little village?” So the block party is between the two main stages. The 4 Elements of Hip Hop and the skateboard ramp are just south of one of the stages. The conference is just on the north end of the footprint. We’re just a little community for the next few days.
A.H.
What we’ve been able to accomplish with this condensed footprint is that you’re not going to be able to walk more than a few feet without having a new experience. There’s tons of little surprises and really cool activations throughout the footprint, so the more you walk around, the more you realize is here and the more things that you can see and experience–both for ticketholders and just for the general public.
We have a lot of activations that are free to the public, from Taste of Somewhere, our big food court area, to the Change Starts Somewhere Block Party to the 4 Elements of Hip Hop, where we’ll have olympian Bboy Jeffro and his crew, the RAD crew, doing break dancing performances, as well as some regional performers there DJing, MCing and live graffiti painting. We also have a basketball area where people can do pickup games, with the Wichita State basketball team out on site doing some stuff. We have a dunk competition, and a three-point competition, and a former Harlem Globetrotter who will be here. The skate activation is free, and we also have a really cool, immersive arts experience. It’s basically a futuristic greenhouse that exploded [laughs].
J.H.
It’s the Warehouse Stage. So not only does it have this just absolutely beautiful interactive art installation, we also have a stage program with music both days that is free to the public as well. There’s beautiful art, murals, projection mapping… just cool stuff going on around every corner. We have dance troupes that are going to be throughout the footprint, and the Block Party is filled with social change activations that can just really help illuminate folks to the different resources that are available within our community; maybe they might benefit from those resources, or they know someone in their lives who could benefit from those resources. We’re just trying to make this a transformational experience on a variety of levels.
That community focus seems to be at the heart of the festival’s mission.
A.H.
One thing we’ve experienced throughout our life and career in the music realm is that music is truly one thing in this world that still has the power to bring people together–people from all backgrounds, all socioeconomic backgrounds, all races, all political perspectives, like whatever. The one time people can shed the woes of the world is when they go to a concert, and then they’re immersed in this experience together, collectively experiencing the same thing, having the same emotions and feelings and joy and sadness and happiness and excitement, and all of the ups and downs that you experience in a live music experience. You’re not thinking about what divides us or thinking about what unites us. So that’s really the core of everything that we’ve always done, and what we’re working to do with Somewhere Festival as well.
Somewhere Festival’s social engagement includes a litany of local partner organizations. How do those partnerships figure into the festival experience?
A.H.
We have four basic areas that we’re focusing on this year. We have Build Somewhere, Heal Somewhere, Learn Somewhere and Create Somewhere. Build Somewhere is about economic mobility and combating poverty. We’re partnering with folks from Family Promise, Kansas Health Foundation, Care Portal, who are all working to find new solutions to combating poverty and empowering people to grow and be able to get out of some really tough situations.
Heal Somewhere is focused on mental health and addiction recovery, so we’re partnering with The Phoenix and 1 Million Strong recovery as well, and all of them have resources for addiction recovery and mental health.
For Learn Somewhere, we’re partnering with Wichita Public Library, who are bringing out a bookmobile and some interactive things to really showcase the impact that the local public library has, but also Bella and Learning Lab, which are creating artistic avenues for kids, and new ways for children to receive education tailored to individual academic needs.
With Create Somewhere, we’re working with Harvester Arts Gallery Place. I mean, Harvester Arts are our partner in all of the arts. They’ve been leading all of the arts activations that we’re doing, and they’re just an amazing community partner. They’re also part of the Create Somewhere area, alongside Juniper Academy, Get Your Color On and Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression–FIRE–essentially focusing on freedom of expression in art and music, because that’s something that has definitely been problematic throughout the decades.
I mean, I still remember Tipper Gore, right, and the censorship crusade she was on when NWA came out. That’s still a big deal now. I mean, there’s a lot of cases of people having their creative works be used against them in the court of law, like this is evidence that it’s actually just artistic expression. It is obviously far deeper and more profound than that, freedom of speech in general, especially nowadays, when people are literally being arrested for things that they say. So that’s another really interesting component that will be part of our social change activations.
It’s all geared towards the hope that people go to the music festival and they have fun, right, but we’re also hoping that they engage in some of these things that can have a profound effect on society as a whole. These are really serious issues that are happening in our society. A big goal of ours is to work together within the community to build new ideas and new solutions for all of these things. How do we unify around ideas, right, and then explore these ideas and have honest discussions about those ideas?
Could you speak to some of the ways that Somewhere Festival, as a non-profit event, reinvests in the local community?
J.H.
I think one of the leading elements of that is just that we’re able to offer ticket prices that are accessible to the majority of our community. Over the last decade, we’ve seen massive inflation in festival prices, and really all live entertainment, which definitely becomes a major barrier for so many people across the socio-economic sphere. Thanks to our nonprofit status, we are able to offer tickets at a price that is much more accessible. You know, there are so many folks for whom that’s still going to be unfortunately outside of their reach, but we’re really hoping that this becomes something that is accessible–this isn’t just something that people would like to do. That’s something that’s very, very close to my heart. Music has become exclusionary in our current ecosystem, the rural industry, and so to be able to offer this in a bit of a more accessible way is something that really, truly makes me sleep a little easier.
A.H.
We’re also offering a lot of music that segments of the community are really excited about, and it’s acts that typically wouldn’t play Wichita, right? So having this opportunity to bring artists like deadmau5 and BigXThaPlug and Flying Lotus and Suki Waterhouse in. Beyond that, all the artists playing on all the stages really showcase amazing, impactful talent, and doing it at that accessible ticket price as a locally produced festival. We’re not a traveling festival that’s going city to city and just putting on a new facade that says it’s community focused, but is really just extracting resources from that community. A lot of festivals now are just massive extraction at this point, and this is truly a community built festival, which unfortunately is something that’s going away now.
J.H.
It’s just so incredibly hard to sustain.
A.H.
So the non-profit standpoint really helps to drive the soul and the purpose of this festival, and this investment is bigger than just a music festival. It’s really focused on making a really positive impact in our community and beyond.
J.H.
Our background is in the live music sphere, heavily involved in the National Independent Venue Association when that kicked off and did all the work it did in 2020, so we’re very well-versed in how the live music ecosystem has evolved over the last few decades. We are just incredibly grateful that due to our nonprofit status, we have a little bit more flexibility to remain in existence. So many of our other peers just haven’t had the ability. We’re just so grateful that we are able to provide this offering to our community.
What vision drove the acts you booked for Somewhere Festival’s second year, and are there any that you feel best reflect the event’s core values?
A.H.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, looking at artists, it’s really first and foremost about their art, right? Like, what does their art represent and how is it performed–you know, just to ensure that when performing at a festival, they’re going to blow people’s minds, right? And we feel like we did a really good job of really looking at those artists that bring an insanely amazing, impactful live experience.
Then, beyond that, it was really diving into their backgrounds and what they want to contribute back to their own communities. I mean, you look at somebody like Aloe Blacc, and he’s doing amazing work. Elise Trouw, she’s doing some really interesting work, and has some new material that will be coming out soon that is going to be insanely impactful. Artists like the La Luz, Shannon and the Clams; I mean, even Lyrics Born and things that he’s done in his communities. Die Spitz, Morpho, Martin Luther. I mean, the list goes on and on.
Really the core principle or value is like, “What are the artists actively doing?” Literally everybody on the lineup is actively doing something to try to create a positive social impact in their own way, or in their own area of experience or passion. Talia Keys is another prime example of somebody who is insanely active in her community and doing things that are really fighting to make a more just and fair and unified world, And Marcy Yates–I’m just looking at the lineup, just I could blindly point my finger at any artist and, like, give it a whole synopsis on their social engagement.
J.H.
So many of these artists are giving back to their communities. It’s just an incredible gift that Adam and I have been given that we get to work on a festival like this–that we’re not driven by the profits. We’re driven by how we can make the most positive impact, and it’s just an incredibly beautiful moment for us.
