Gloucester Daily Times
Thursday February 16, 2006
Front page: http://www.gloucestertimes.com/

Lifestyle
City arts group gets $40K boost from state

By Gail McCarthy
Staff writer

The Gloucester arts organization seARTS got a $40,000 grant as the state announced funding for cultural and arts development efforts. In all, the North Shore got $128,000 in support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

The Massachusetts Cultural Council released $1.35 million in grants this week, announcing local recipients at three events North of Boston, including in Salem.

The Gloucester arts organization was created to promote the area's cultural and artistic wealth.

Susan Erony, seARTS executive director, said she was thrilled at the news of the grant, which means the organization can continue to blossom and grow.

But the grant also means further fundraising efforts.

"This is a matching grant, so we have to raise a huge chunk of change," she said.

For starters, the organization has raised about $5,000. Some of the match can be in-kind contributions. The deadline is December to match the grant.

Erony credited local artist Lara Lepionka, who wrote the proposal for the $50,000 grant. SEArts had hoped to receive about half that amount.

"This allows us to build on what we started last year and solidify the organization," Erony said. "This will help us make ourselves much more clear to the public and galvanize the relationship with seARTS' partners."

Those partners are the Rocky Neck Art Colony, the city, North of Boston Visitors and Convention Bureau, the online arts resource entity Arts Gloucester, the Cape Ann Chamber of Commerce and the Gloucester New Arts Festival.

In particular, the money will help seARTS with new efforts and expanding ongoing ones. Among the new efforts will be the promotion of the murals in City Hall painted under the auspices of the government-funded Works Progress Administration, which dates back to the 1930s and 1940s.

Ongoing efforts that the money will help include the New Arts Festival, which debuted last summer. Part of the festival included a seARTS program called Partner with an Artist, which was designed to bring artists and businesses together in innovative ways.

"The idea is to push artists to think about how to work in unconventional settings and work directly with people who work in the business as well as those visiting a business," Erony said. "The idea is also to bring visitors to underutilized spaces."

Local performing artist Sarah Slifer did just that at the first New Arts Festival when she brought dancers to perform on ice blocks at Cape Pond Ice last summer. The Partner with an Artist program will be expanded with this grant. seARTS will give eight $1,000 grants to artists this year for that project.

"This is what distinguishes seARTS," Erony said. "We don't just promote things we generate. We are looking for organizations and individuals in the community who are doing important cultural work, and we want to really try to bring them funding and support."

seARTS helped support the Rocky Neck Artist Colony when it started its artist-in-residence program last summer.

SEArts also will start a new community education program, which will begin in March with three lectures on contemporary art. The event will be held at the Sawyer Free Library in collaboration with the Lyceum. Three more lectures will take place in the summer on Cape Ann art history.

The money also is being used to cultivate year-round tourism by placing local contemporary artists in the limelight and revitalizing activity in the harbor areas, according to the council.

"We will take full advantage of this money to showcase our cultural attributes and history, which is something that I think is grossly underutilized as an opportunity to attract tourists," said Steven Magoon, treasurer of the Gloucester Committee for the Arts. "We have an incredible fishing heritage, but we also have a rich culture here."

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem received $43,000 under the council's John and Abigail Adams Arts Program for Cultural Economic Development to fund its "Painting Summer in New England" exhibit. The exhibit debuts this April and runs through September.

Also receiving a grant is the city of Lynn, which will use its $45,000 to launch a series of monthly evening events in Central Square, including children's activities, art demonstrations, live music and art openings to bring more foot traffic into local businesses.

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