Community Arts
ACHF Arts Access
Our goal is to increase the number of artists participating in the online registration process from 65 last year to around 75 from the Metropolitan Region. Participating artist's survey will find out if the artists liked our new four theme entry categories or if we should return to the common media categories that we have used in the past years. The evaluation process will include an artist survey to gauge how well the four-theme categories were accepted. By looking through the registration database we will hopefully determine if there was a significant expansion of artist participation in surrounding metropolitan counties compared to last year.
Our challenge was to provide a realistic, convenient, and artistic venue for local and regional artists to share and exhibit their artwork. The process contained an online application, a pre-event jury process, artwork delivery and showcase venue, in-person judging by three judges, a public reception and awards announcement, delivery of artwork to local businesses and city offices, public display for 30 days, and concluded with the artwork returned to artists. We planned to increase our participating artists and increase the number of pieces of artwork entered through an increased digital advertising and artist contact and new artwork categories. Unfortunately we did not achieve our artistic goals this year. Our number of participating artists dropped from 70 artists in 2015 to 49 artists this year. Our total artwork pieces fell from 111 to 81 pieces this year. After a five year gain, this year was our first downswing. Despite the lower numbers, through artist and community feedback we feel that we had a number of successes. This year we moved the art collection, judging, reception to a more public venue of the Cherrywood Pointe Senior Living Center in Savage. We had great collaboration with the management at Cherrywood which allowed us a 4-days special showing of all the artwork in one highly accessible room. Over 100 residents of this independent living facility were able to view the artwork and participate in the awards ceremony. This did effectively increase of community contact and awareness to a new group of people and we received many positive comments from them. For the first year we were able to utilize our new location at the Savage Library for artwork pickup (just across the street from the Cherrywood) and artists got a chance to visit our gallery and classrooms. We expect this to have a positive impact to the awareness of our group and its mission of bringing art to the community. Although we are still researching to determine why our overall artist and artwork numbers were down, we suspect, but can’t yet confirm, that it could be related to one or more of these factors: Moving the competition and show dates back one month from our previous time frames. Changing our artwork categories from medium based to artistic focus/content. Raising our entry fees by approximately 20%. Reducing the amount of printed advertising through local newspapers. We believe some of these factors may have adversely affected our planned and expected growth. We are continuing to reach out to the artists and the community to solicit feedback to determine future changes. It is quite possible there were just too many changes this year and we may need to return one or more factors to previous conditions. We continue to have growing support from the business community, the local artist community and within the Savage Arts Council and have confidence we can continue to offer artistic opportunities. We successfully reached a bigger cross section of the community by moving our awards reception to a more public display at Cherrywood. This also increased the number of people who had a chance to see the artwork. We had approximately 70% of the artists attend the awards ceremony, up from previous years. At the previous location (the Environmental Learning Center) the artwork as up only for the day of the ceremony and even though it is a great display location, it limited exposure due the limited time. This was the first year we could leave the entire display up and accessible for 4 days during the judging and ceremony times. Effectively this gave us an additional community venue during the show. Our estimated population benefitting was as we predicted even though we believe there was an increase in the two areas of individuals with disabilities and individuals in institutions. However not enough of a change to warrant a 25% increase in any one area. This year we reached out the American Indian population through the Mystic Lake community hoping to involve them more with our competition and show venue. They indicated an interest and informed their community but did not actively participate in a display venue. We look forward to continuing to build this relationship. We did get a few more participating artists from that cultural group. Use of the Cherrywood Pointe facility to host the entire competition, show and ceremony in a more public place that had the extra added benefit of providing accessibility to hundreds of people who may not have otherwise had the chance. This year over 60% of our participating artists were new to our competition and show up from the typical 40% of previous years.
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