Working for the Floyd Center for the Arts (formally The Jacksonville Center for the Arts), allowed me to grow as a designed of educational programming. Below is a short list of hundreds of opportunities I designed and/or implemented at The Center.
Afternoon Arts
Elementary art students enjoy two afternoon arts classes weekly at The Center. I either taught these classes myself or supervised other instructors for this program in visual, musical, creative writing and theatrical arts.
Art Works For Us
This is a program of establishing and educated the Floyd community about large scale public art. With the help of nationally known artist Charlie Brouwer, we conceptualized how to bring a large and costly program to the small rural community. With the input of many other artists, this educational program was designed and implemented in 2015.
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Floyd County High School Art Exhibit
High school students are give the opportunity to learn how a full scale art exhibition is created. Students worked with The Center staff to mat and frame their work. Then they worked with our volunteer gallery committee to organize and hang their art. This process also includes creating tags for the artwork, promotional materials, and organizing a gallery opening event. Local elementary and other high school students were then able tour the gallery during the exhibit.
Open Studios
The Floyd Center for the Arts has a drawing/painting classroom, a hot glass studio, ceramics studio, and coal blacksmithing forge when I started at The Center in 2012. Sometimes no one was in these studios for days when there were not classes running, but we know many people had interest in them. We implemented a plan to gain more public interest in these spaces by holding Open Studio Times. We had an artist that worked in that medium monitor the studio for safety purposes and invited anyone to come in to work. We had many artists use the studios that were trained in these arts, but had no studio set up of there own. Many of them then became instructors or volunteers at The Center as well. In 2015 we were able to add a digital photo lab to the offerings as well.
Featured Artist
Each year The Center's Board of Directors chooses a notable regional artist as a Featured Artist of the Year. I worked with each of them to create unique educational and gallery programming. Artist Charlie Brouwer and I developed Floyd Art Dialogues (FAD). FAD was a well attended meeting of the artist minds but was open to all community members. These once a month lunch-time gatherings discussed arts education, artists needs, funding, public art, and more. The program "Art Works for Us" was born from this educational activity. Other Featured Arts held educational lectures, open houses, and workshops, all free to the arts community.
Kids Day
Exposing children to the arts is an intricate part of their education. Kids Day was a free activity day at The Center for children and families. Multiple arts educational activities were planned and over saw by artist volunteers. Special touring artists were brought to The Center to perform as a finale event of the day.
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