Collab Fest 17, organized and documented by Jim Leftwich, occurred on April 8, 2009. On the Flickr page for Collab Fest 17 there is a really good quote from Laurie Simmons taken from her project at ART : 21. I really like her comment because it explains so concisely the way that artists see the world around them, and are inspired by it.
Laurie Simmons: “I think that artists are always doing research on their own behalf and for their work. For some artists it’s reading. For some it’s shopping. For some it’s traveling. And I think that there’s always this kind of seeking quality that artists have where they’re looking for things that will jog them and move them in one direction or another. For me, movies and books have always been research. Finding objects will always stimulate a series or get my mind going in another direction. I might be wandering around and see a figure or a piece of furniture or a picture that just starts me thinking about a whole other direction that I can move in. And of course that has to intersect with what I’m thinking about, my state of mind, my feeling about current politics or some psychological issue that’s pressing. I see that all as research, just having all the threads of your life come together to tell you where you should go with your work.”
The Collab Fest 17 page has more comments from Art:21 by artists Lari Pittman, Judy Pfaff, and Pierre Huyghe too. There are also some great images on Jim Leftwich's Flickr page, along with the comment above from Laurie Simmons. There is only a single image from Collab Fest 17 on the site, but there are lots of great shots of Collab Fest 18 (April 22, 2009) there. Jim Leftwich has been pretty busy putting together these Collaboration Festivals over the past years, and has about two years worth of images on Flickr.com.