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Writer's pictureEmily Kiewel

Fun and Funds in August at the Charles City Arts Center

Fun



Its been a very busy month at the Charles City Arts Center. We started out with an Opening Reception for Mariah Piippo on the 2nd. Her show is titled “Color & Texture” and its a very fitting title… just look at her work!



"Inspired by nature and seeking catharsis, Piippo began integrating texture into landscape paintings. Using primarily sand and rocks mixed with acrylics, she crafted compositions that celebrate the beauty and resilience of the natural world."


Mariah Piippo is a 2020 University of Northern Iowa graduate from Mason City, Iowa currently working at NIACC’s Performing Arts & Leadership Series as Assistant Director. Her work will be on display through August 31st so you have a couple more days before we switch to the next exhibit.


Saturday the 17th was a very busy and fun day. It was the 51st Annual Art-a-Fest held in Central Park, right outside our front doors. This year we had 42 artists participating, along with live music all day, free kids activities and food trucks. The weather was wonderful and there was a lot of artwork purchased. 


Kent Shankle was the judge for this year’s event and we were very excited about it. Kent has has spent over 35 years working in community arts administration. He was the Director of the Waterloo Center for the Arts for many years before retiring last year. He is currently serving as Interim Director of the Waldemar A. Schmidt Art Gallery at Wartburg College. He chose 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 5 honorable mentions as well as a special Judge’s Favorite award in honor of Jean Semelhack.


Andreas Soemadi-1st Prize Sue Kennicott-2nd Prize Doug Cole-3rd Prize


Check out the Art-a-Fest website and their Facebook page for more pictures. As always, we relied heavily on volunteers. Without them Art-a-Fest would not be the success it was. You can find a list of volunteers and sponsors on the Art-a-Fest website. We are currently looking for volunteers for next year’s event, specifically for our participation and fundraising/advertising committees. Please contact us here if you would like to get involved.


Funds


We have a lot of projects in the works this year and have been applying to a variety of local, regional and state grants to fund these projects. For a small non profit like us these grants provide much needed financial support that helps keep us vibrant and viable!


We received a grant at the beginning of the year from the Floyd Community Foundation (local affiliate of the North East Iowa Community Foundation) to upgrade our gallery lighting. Our current lighting system is not working well and we are switching to LED lights to help lower our carbon footprint. We received a 2nd grant to fund the rest of this project just this month from the Cultural and Entertainment District Grant Program from Charles City Community Revitalization. We also received some funds through a private donation.


In July we received a grant from the Charles City Community Fund. This excellent organization funds non profits here in Charles City and Floyd county and is completely volunteer run! They work hard all year raising money to help support numerous non profits every year. With their support we were able to purchase a computer (using it right now!). It replaced our noisy little lap top that we had been using since 2020.


We’ve also received a Cultural Capacity Building Grant from the Iowa Arts Council. They help disperse monies from federal and regional arts & culture entities to local organizations within the state of Iowa.




“Support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Iowa ArtsCouncil, which exists within the Iowa Economic Development Authority.”


 One of the reasons this grant is especially helpful is that it can be used for operating costs. Our plan with these funds is to increase and diversify our open hours to try to reach a more varied audience. There will be some new programming coming as well for those additional open hours so stay tuned! And feel free to contact me if you have some ideas. We love to hear from you!


We want your ideas! Email us: charlescityarts@gmail.com


Speaking of your ideas… we have a survey we want you to fill out! We want to make sure we are offering our community the programming and events that they are interested in and looking for ways to improve. You can come in and fill out the survey at the Arts Center or click this link. The on-line version is anonymous so you can feel confident about giving honest feed back.


Thanks for the read, make sure you subscribe to our website and follow our Facebook page to keep up with upcoming exhibits, classes and events!



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