The first three months of the year are always a very special time here in the Community Engagement Department. In the spirit of transformations and new beginnings, it is traditionally the time of year when our individual artist grants and awards are open for applications – namely, what we call our Student Artists Awards, that being the Jean Breaux Award (JBA) and the Courtney Granger Memorial Award (CGMA) (working in grants you very quickly learn the value of an acronym) and our annual ArtSpark Grant, which every year attracts a menagerie of ambitious and endlessly creative projects from artists across the Acadiana region.
Every year it is Anna and I’s task to educate artists about, and help them take advantage of, these opportunities – offering information sessions, draft feedback, one on one brainstorming sessions – anything needed to get an artist from the ever so comfy dreaming stage to the equally scary planning stage (we won’t speak yet about the dreaded doing stage). And not just in Lafayette! In February we conduct our annual whirlwind tour of the 8 parishes, traveling everywhere from Franklin to Ville Platte to spread the word of what the AcA has to offer – this year assisted by our crack team of ArtSpark Ambassadors.
Looking at all this it might be easy to focus on the amount of work that’s required to make programs like JBA, CGMA, and ArtSpark possible (I know it’s easy for me), and I won’t say Anna and I aren’t exhausted by the time May rolls around. However, this is always, without competition, my favorite time of the year. Because it exemplifies what I consider to be our most important and rewarding task in Community Engagement: making art possible. We live in a world that is fast, loud, and complex – a world where fifty different things are constantly demanding your time, money, and attention. And art, quite often, is the fiftieth in line.
A commonality among all the artists, young and old, that apply for these programs is that they want to be making art. But almost always there is something preventing them. Sometimes this barrier is financial, an issue that awards and grants are designed to combat, but it can also be informational. Put simply, very rarely does anyone, even in school, sit these artists down and explain to them how these systems work. How does one apply for grants, or even find out about them? How does one find buyers for their work? Start a business? Pay taxes? Another often underestimated barrier is mental. Artists need to be shown that their art is important and that it’s worth investing in – that there are people out there for which their art is not only of value but a priority. They need someone to wave art up to the front of that fifty task line, and being that someone is my favorite part of the job.
As we move into April and our application windows close, we enter an ever so slight lull as our panels and committees begin the process of reading, scoring, and ultimately choosing this year’s successful applicants. That’s not to say we’ve given ourselves a break (imagine!). Coming up this month we have the next entry in our Artist Talk series, featuring our current Main Gallery artists Kathy Reed and Steve Breaux. We also have a very exciting Music Industry Town Hall, featuring Kylie Gaspard (Cashier), producer Brandon Nezey (the Cupid Shuffle), Joel Savoy (Valcour Records), and Teddy Lamson (touring drummer for Shania Twain) discussing everything in this ever changing music world from venue relations to AI. Talk about breaking down informational barriers!
Anyway, I’ve waxed poetic for too long already and Allison will be mad at me, so I’ll end it here. Thank you to all of you who’ve read this far. If you take nothing else away but this, make art a priority in your life. It’s more important than you think!
