Ambitions in the Arts
Emporia Arts Council works to improve city’s quality of life
By Joey Berlin
Saturday, March 8, 2008
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of an occasional series looking at the Emporia Arts Council and its campaign to fund a new building on Commercial Street.
The Emporia Arts Council has a common goal with other organizations in the city: Improve the quality of life in Emporia.
That common goal has led to partnerships and collaborative activities with many other prominent organizations in town, including Emporia Main Street, Emporia Recreation Center, the Flint Hills Technical College, and Emporia State University. As the arts council tries to secure $2.6 million for a new building on Commercial Street just north of the Granada Theater, enhancing those partnerships is one factor Executive Director Melissa Windsor has in mind.
“We just have so many programs, absolutely it would enhance the programming that we have to offer,” Windsor said. “Some programs grow; we come up with new ways that we can partner with new people and find new activities and new opportunities to appeal and provide a quality programming for the entire community.”
Some of the arts council’s partnerships are long-standing; others are brand new. The council’s collaboration on Emporia Main Street’s Artist Walk, which will be held April 19, is a longtime event. But this year, the arts council will be involved with the Flint Hills Technical College’s summer Kids College for the first time. Every Thursday during the Kids College, the council will take its colorfully decorated bus, the Artmobile, to the tech college and have the Kids College students do crafts for three hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon.
“We’re really excited we can take the Artmobile out there and get the kids involved in our activity,” Windsor said. “Just having the mere presence of the Artmobile is really exciting for kids.”
The recreation center’s collaboration with the arts council includes its Summer Theater Camp, a weeklong event for 6- to 10-year-olds that began last year. The kids are dropped off at the arts center for four hours and begin putting together a play, which is performed at the end of the week. At noon, the rec center picks the children up and brings them back for lunch and other activities, such as swimming and bowling.
“It was kind of cool, because they got to learn all aspects of it,” said the rec center’s Adraina Holopirek, “from the set, and then they all got a part in the play, too.”
Also, the rec center’s annual Camp Wilson, which features a different group of children each week during the summer, travels to the arts center once a week for a craft project. Holopirek said she believes a new arts building downtown would spark more interest in activities like those.
The Young Thespian Players have benefited greatly from their four-year partnership with the arts council, which began before Windsor became the director. The group of aspiring actors rehearses and performs its twice-a-year shows at the arts center’s small Black Box Theater.
“The partnership has been great,” Young Thespians Director Penni Hansen said. “The (arts council) board came, saw that we were doing this on our own, and they welcomed us there. ... It just a matter then of trying to find the time for the one big room that they had.”
The theater planned for the new arts center will be about the same size of the Black Box Theater, but Hansen said the difference for the Young Thespians will be the extra space afforded by the layout of the new building and the ability to have more performances per year because of greater availability of the rehearsal space.
“It’s gonna be great — I mean, I’m all for it,” Hansen said. “It’s gonna make all the difference in the world as far as being able to do additional shows. We’re gonna be able to offer classes in there as well, like after-school kinda stuff. It’d be great.”
The arts council’s campaign leadership committee was able to raise more than $48,000 in gifts and pledges last week to put toward the Mabee Foundation challenge grant. The arts council’s final deadline to raise the money for the grant is March 28. If it earns the Mabee grant, the council will be just $400,000 away from securing the $2.6 million for the new facility. Windsor hopes to wrap up fundraising in July and for ground to be broken on the arts center in the fall, which she knows is an ambitious goal.
“I think we’ve been pretty ambitious all along,” Windsor said. “I think that you have to be able to have a dream and have a vision and look to get it done.”