Keep Those Kids Involved in Art
While in school, kids get on a set schedule. Bedtimes, mornings, school, and after-school times all get wired into their routine and they know what to expect at those appropriate times. While on summer break, our schedule loosens and Jilly gets to stay up later and sleep in a bit more and her daytime activities become less predictable. As a parent concerned with the creativity of my child, I want to make sure that she keeps her creativity sharp.
My wife and I are excited that our oldest daughter is finally old enough to take advantage of the summer camp offerings available in our area. We’ve gotten her signed up for the Community Arts Center’s Arts Exploration Camp (shameless self-promotion) and West T Hill Community Theatre’s Camp Causewelovetoact and I honestly can’t say if she’s more excited about art camp or acting camp, but she is super pumped about both opportunities.
For the younger kids, like our eleven-month old Cora, it’s never too early to break out the sidewalk chalk and let them explore their creative side.
If you have slightly older kids than Cora, 18 months to 4 years, the Community Arts Center offers a new “Munchkin and Me” Camp starting in June that may just be the thing to get your little munchkin primed-and-pumped for a lifetime of creativity. When I was younger, there simply were not enough opportunities like these in our area for the “art kids.” Plenty of athletic opportunities were available, but there simply wasn’t as much of a community focus on the arts as we see going on today. Take advantage of these opportunities to enrich and nurture your child’s inner artist and watch them grow.
Goodbye Arts Center!
This week I am saying farewell to the Arts Center--in a few short days I will be taking up my post as the Communications Fellow at Centre College, where I will be writing lots of web stories and doing lots of Tweeting. It is certainly a bittersweet goodbye, and I will very much miss being a part of all the exciting things happening at the Arts Center. The blog-writing torch will soon be passed to our new Marketing Director, so as my final blog post here at the Arts Center, I’ll take a look back at the top three all-time favorite things I did while I was here.Pressing the Big Red Button
A few short weeks after I got hired, I helped launch the Arts Center’s new and improved website. When I reminisce about the launching of the website, I like to imagine myself hunkered in a control room, dramatically flipping back a plastic cover and slamming my fist on a giant red button. While the official launch of the website was much less exciting than that, I still got quite a thrill from seeing such a large back-burner project come to life. Our new website is (in my quite biased opinion) sleek, sophisticated, and hugely useful for people who want to know what’s going on at the Arts Center. While I put in a huge amount of work coordinating with our web designer and multiple other staff members, it was all worth it when I got to be a part of our new website's birth. The huge sense of accomplishment and the knowledge that I was helping take the Arts Center to the next level are memories I will cherish for a long time to come.Putting on My Dancing Shoes
While ballroom dance classes are nothing new to the Arts Center, they were to me when I first arrived. I took a few classes and soon I was hooked. Before I knew it, I was working with our instructor to plan a monthly ballroom dance designed to draw newbies like myself in while giving our regulars another opportunity to practice their moves. Like anything worth doing, this project required a lot of labor--mostly weekend hours that I gave to work the events. But the effort paid off with a community event that is slowly growing and filling a need for more local dancing opportunities. Making a positive impact on the quality of downtown Danville was something I definitely will not forget (this picture of me at one of our dances captures my excitement pretty well, I think!).Slapping on a New Coat of Paint
I’ve been lucky enough to work on public art in Danville twice: once during the Vice Presidential Debate and once in the month leading up to the Great American Brass Band Festival. Both of these events threw our small Kentucky town into the national spotlight, and the colorful and energetic murals I helped paint definitely put Danville’s best foot (well, windows) forward. The subject of blogs past, my VP debate mural experience was memorable because of how quickly it transformed Main Street and how energetically our community responded to it. The Brass Band mural was memorable for a different reason. The complexity of the Brass Band mural required extensive tracing sessions, which, because we used a projector to create the images, had to be done in the darkness of night. Though tracing until midnight had its downsides, the excitement of completing the first steps and painting in the basic lines that hinted at what would be coming were well worth the bags under my eyes. Both of these projects were ones that resulted in some of the most overt, enthusiastic, and positive community response I saw during my time at the Arts Center. Being connected to such a vibrant and popular community fixture was definitely unforgettable.Wow--what a time I've had at the Arts Center! Thanks to everyone who helped make it such a great experience for me. It is with a special fondness that I will cherish my time and experiences at the Community Arts Center. I can't wait to see what else is in store for this place!
After-hours Extravaganza!
Across the Pond
This past week I was lucky enough to be on vacation, although when I was hurtling through the air at over 600 miles per hour, squeezed into a pressurized tin can 50,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean, I wasn’t feeling particularly lucky--I was feeling cramped, dehydrated, and fighting the feeling that every bump meant impending doom. I guess you could say I’m not the best with airplanes. However, after landing at Heathrow Airport in London, England and catching a bus to Cheltenham, the home of a college friend, I began to feel much luckier. Over the next week, as we traveled to Belfast, Northern Ireland, Edinburgh, Scotland, and back to London, I not only had a blast reconnecting with a friend and getting away from it all (not to mention getting my fill of Guinness and pub food!), I was lucky enough to see an amazing array of public art.Belfast
Belfast is a place with a chaotic past, thanks to a complicated and nuanced societal rift that bridges politics, religion, socio-economic levels, and family history. Most people know Belfast’s public art as the colorful and often divisive political murals declaring loyalty either to the British Crown or Republic of Ireland, or siding with important political causes elsewhere. While these murals certainly stamp the city with its own brand of outspokenness, the public art I saw on this trip was a more diverse and ultimately more playful variety.
Edinburgh
Edinburgh stood out as an arresting fusion of the old and new. Amid winding cobbled streets and craggy battlements were graceful and elegant sculptures and buildings. I was too busy taking it all in to stop and get any photos, so I had to nab a few pictures from the web. This is just the tip of the iceberg of Edinburgh public art, but even this tidbit is amazing!
London public art astounded me with its variety and grandeur. Again, this is but a small sliver of the giant layer cake that is London public art, but I hope it hooks you!
