From farmers’ markets to outdoor movie theaters, the McCarthy Quad has been dressed up to fit all kinds of events for students. On March 27, it donned neon colors and two concert stages to turn into an arts and music festival venue.
The USC Performing Arts Committee (PAC) hosted Artscape: POV for the first time, a cross-disciplinary arts and music festival. The event featured a food market, student art installations, multiple student dance performances, a side stage and a main stage. The side stage, called the “QUASA stage,” was sponsored by the Queer Student Association and featured student music artists UnderSCore, Denseboy and Moray.
PAC collaborated with Visions and Voices to present event headliners BETWEEN FRIENDS. The Los Angeles-based music duo took the main stage at 10:16 p.m., following student openers Small Talk and Ayla Claire.
Meredith Ziegler, a sophomore majoring in theatrical design, and Maximum Patri, a junior majoring in business administration, were co-executive producers of the event. The two modeled the event after the overarching theme of “perspective.”
“It’s all about the different ways that we view the world, and bringing color and life to that,” Ziegler said.
Bright neon colors covered the event grounds, inviting students to explore nine different bright and immersive student art installations. The installations were all designed by student artists, and funded and produced by PAC.
In front of Doheny Library, multiple dance pieces were performed by students throughout the night. Ava La France, a junior majoring in dance, performed in a group dance about women’s empowerment. The three-person group, wearing bright orange and yellow bikinis, emphasized their female perspective in their electrifying dance choreographed by junior Stella Wong.
“It’s about embracing your femininity and your power in the female bodies we’re given,” La France said.
Ziegler and Patri began planning the event last April and have since been fundraising, contacting artists, and setting up the event layout to make the festival come to life.
“This was just an idea, like a tiny little spark, and it turned into something so huge,” Ziegler said.
Ziegler said this is the largest event PAC has ever hosted, with 2,500 RSVPs on EngageSC midway through the event. BETWEEN FRIENDS’s set gathered the largest crowd of the night, with students covering nearly the entire quad. Patri credited the USC Student Government, along with PAC’s 43-member executive board, for making the event possible.
“It takes a community to pull off an event this large, and so much dedication,” Ziegler said. “We’re so appreciative to everyone who made this happen, because there’s no way we could have done it by ourselves.”
In the future, PAC plans to host Artscape events annually, with a different theme for the art installations and performances each year.
“We’ve been working on this for so long, it’s been so hard to picture what the event would actually look like,” Patri said. “To see it come to life, and see how happy people are, the attendees and our crew…and then to see the awarding experience for attendees has been so empowering.”