Music in the Garden Festival (MITG) is a summer music festival for Chicago’s emerging musicians and artists whose practices are experimental, renegade, and

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 had over 120 audience members in attendance each of our first two years.

At MITG, we place a strong emphasis on promoting young, creative voices in the Chicago area, but we have also collaborated with visual artists, poets, and improvising musicians from across the US (Seattle, Boston, Baltimore, San Diego, Connecticut). We have had the joy of collaborating with Oak Park Public Library, Temple B’nai, Studio Nez art gallery, and Looking Glass Bookstore to bring the work of installation artists and musicians in the form of pop-up shows.

In November 2024, we presented our third iteration of Music in the Garden in collaboration with Elastic Arts Foundation to present a 2-day music festival.