I have to say how impressed I am by the unity and cooperation that the staff, interns, and volunteers of The Art Studio have exhibited over this year. From exhibitions to workshops and children’s art activities that seem to spring from nothing, The Studio is buzzing with planned and unplanned events. Through impromptu tours with drop-in visitors curious on what we really do here, we are being found by more groups and organizations that want to utilize The Arts as a backdrop for a social event. A good example is a program for women in the Coastguard and their program director asked to do a Raku with their participants. This was the first time in my entire art career I had heard the words “Coastguard” and “Raku” put together in a sentence. The outcome was fantastic! The firing went perfectly and the enthusiasm from the participants was all any instructor could hope for. And they brought food—‘nuf said! It takes a lot of hands to put on the events we do but the benefit we get from presenting these activities far outweighs the labor to do them.
With all this activity, including the salt kiln build in June, I was encouraged to write a proposal to the Yuma Art Symposium. The proposal is about The Studio and all the amazing things we do. We hope to inspire people who want to hear about The Art Studio and how what we did could be translated to something they could utilize for their own communities. Our involvement in the Yuma Art Symposium would give us a much-needed boost in what is going on in the nonprofit sector of The Arts. We haven’t had time to go outside our shell and see what is happening in the rest of the world. I also hope we find some great ideas we could use for ourselves. The connections we make now will be beneficial to us in conferences to come.
