Arts and Culture
Fairfield is home to the Fairfield Arts & Convention Center (FACC), a 32,000 square feet (3,000 m2) building that cost $6 million to build. The complex consists of a 522-seat proscenium theatre, a business pavilion, meeting rooms, executive conference suite, art gallery, commercial kitchen, offices and outdoor plaza. The convention center features 7,700 sq ft (720 m2) of exhibition space and 5,000 square feet (460 m2) of meeting space. The facility opened on December 7, 2007 with a theater named the Stephen Sondheim Center for the Performing Arts, after the American composer, Stephen Sondheim. As the first theater named after Sondheim, its opening was attended by seven Broadway actors connected with Sondheim's plays. In May 2010, the facility became "essentially" city-owned, following a citywide vote.
On the first Friday night of every month, Fairfield hosts the 1st Fridays Art Walk, which attracts more than 2,500 visitors and showcases local and national artists in downtown galleries and occasional live, outdoor music. In 2005, the city's Friday Art Walk was named Iowa's Tourism Event of the Year. In 2006, the city was named one of the "12 Great Places You've Never Heard Of" by Mother Earth News magazine, which cited its ayurvedic health spa, high amount of restaurants per capita, and 25 art galleries; it characterized the city as a "sustainable and cosmopolitan town". In the same year, the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs designated Fairfield as one of the Iowa Great Places.
In 2009, a concert by The Beach Boys and The Nadas was held on the Fairfield Middle School grounds, as a benefit for the FACC and the city's Green Sustainability Plan. The concert was sponsored by the David Lynch Foundation. This was the 40th, and final performance of The Beach Boy's summer tour of 2009. Fairfield was selected by the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs to be one of six Iowa Great Places to participate in new program to revitalize the cultural arts in 2010.
Maharishi University of Management relocated to Fairfield in 1974, which attracted students from around the world. Following a world peace conference in 1979, about 800 people moved to Fairfield after being urged to do so by the university's founder. Fairfield has been described as an "international center" for Transcendental Meditation; a "national magnet" and "the world's largest training center" for practitioners of the Transcendental Meditation technique. Many of its current residents moved there to participate in the group practice of the TM and TM-Sidhi program inside one of the two golden domes built in 1981 and 1982 on the Maharishi University of Management campus. Locally, TM practitioners are sometimes called "roos", slang for gurus, a term they have appropriated, although they also refer to themselves as "meditators". Fairfield natives are sometimes known as "townies". Yogic Flyers living in Fairfield who are not part of the university are said to be members of the "Town Super Radiance" (TSR) community. In 2004, National Public Radio reported that "after 30 years, many in Iowa are comfortable with Fairfield's TM community" and a 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal said "natives lived uneasily with the outsiders...but the election of Mr. Malloy ... helped ease those tensions".
According to author Jack Forem, Fairfield is home to one of the largest synagogues in Iowa and one of the largest Liberal Catholic Churches in the nation.
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