Music in the Garden Festival (MITG) is a 2-day music festival for musicians and artists whose practices are experimental, renegade, and unorthodox. Curated by Caroline Jesalva and Aaron Kaufman-Levine, each festival features a lineup of musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists.

Music in the Garden was created in the summer of 2021 by musicians Caroline Jesalva and Aaron Kaufman-Levine. We started as a completely DIY concert series during the pandemic when traditional methods of performance and creative collaboration couldn’t happen. During our first season, we held an experimental 4-part concert series outdoors in a patron’s backyard in Oak Park, IL.

Our mission is to hold a multidisciplinary space where independent artists have total freedom on how they present their original music, art, and creative practice. We received overwhelming support from the community, and have since evolved the concert series into a 2-day festival presented at Elastic Arts Foundation.

At MITG, we place a strong emphasis on promoting creative voices in the Chicago area. Additionally, we have collaborated with visual artists, poets, and improvising musicians from across the US (Seattle, Boston, Baltimore, San Diego, Connecticut, New York). We have had the joy of collaborating with Elastic Arts Foundation, Oak Park Public Library, Temple B’nai, Studio Nez art gallery, and Looking Glass Bookstore on previous iterations of the festival.