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Bottleracks & Fountains - Building an Audience and Daring to Go Big

Building an Audience and Daring to Go Big

Bottleracks & Fountains

04/17/19 • 36 min

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Louise Kennelly settled in Maryland after adventures around the country and abroad, and has been in her position at Frederick Arts Council for three and a half years. She notes that interest in contemporary art has really taken off in Frederick during this time.

She talks about working through the bureaucracies of art in public spaces, compromising and having a plan B. The Sky Stage that was created with the artist Heather Theresa Clark is an example that persistence pays off. It hosts 150 events every season, where the community decides what they want and the arts council facilitates access to the space. Seed money from local family foundations came with the promise of more financial support if the community showed that they were committed to this project, and it turned out to be a huge success. We should trust artists to imagine and create something unprecedented.

The question remains: Does the community want and need contemporary art? And how do you build an audience? Personal connections to artists and the theme or narrative of the work that is relevant to the local community organically draw people in to see the work and develop a sense of what contemporary art can be. “The local community is picking up the slack which the national culture is not satisfying,” says Louise, emphasizing intimacy, authenticity, kindness, empathy, and communication as valuable aspects of the work. It addresses the basic need for connection, collaboration, and experimentation, which seems to be lacking in the broader culture.

It is important to give people the benefit of the doubt, allowing for complex interactions and relationships to exist. It's easier to put your differences aside in a smaller community and to have a real conversation. There is an openness to risk-taking. Louise thinks that there is a renaissance at the local level of arts initiatives, because people feel the need for getting together in the same room, sharing the same physical space, something there is less and less of in our daily lives where most interactions are mediated by a screen. She says: “If you put aside your preconceptions about what people can or cannot handle with contemporary art, you'd be surprised.”

The next step is to think about what it would look like for young artists to be able to live and work locally? Making it sustainable for individual artists, who should have a commercial lens and get more creative with the business side of things. There is a need for a community arts center where artists can all get together, and more opportunities for paid work for artists. And more art parties! The Frederick Arts Council has a policy now that they don’t take anything for free, and are strict about paying everybody. For that, we salute you, and hope that others follow suit.

Links:

Frederick Arts Council: http://frederickartscouncil.org/
Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program: https://rair.org/rair
Artist Heather Theresa Clark, Sky Stage in Frederick, MD: http://heather-clark.com/project/sky-stage/
Artist Thomas Faison: https://vimeo.com/tomfaison
Frederick Arts Council's Festival for the Arts: https://www.visitfrederick.org/event/26th-annual-frederick-festival-of-the-arts/9596/
Wing Young Huie: https://www.wingyounghuie.com/
AS220 in Providence, RI: https://as220.org

04/17/19 • 36 min

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