The Community Conversation on What’s Next: Sharon Arts Center drew the local artistic community together to articulate their needs and potential solutions in the wake of Sharon Arts Center’s closure, resulting in a short list of active volunteers to guide the process forward and a robust list of the attendees’ chief concerns and sentiments.
The group engaged in a structured discussion to determine the future home of the Sharon Arts Center community. They were directed to discuss whether they should save the Sharon Arts Center building and develop a financially sustainable plan for its use, partner with the MAxT Makerspace, or develop something independent of the Sharon building or MAxT to meet their needs.
Session questions also asked how participants were personally willing to help, and to identify the greatest needs of the community. This event came on the heels of an Aug. 13 Community Conversation, and the August closure of the Sharon Arts Center’s two locations: a studio in Sharon and a gallery and store in downtown Peterborough. The decision was made by New England College, which owned the buildings since the New Hampshire Institute of Art merged with them this July.
Overall group sentiment was that a sense of community was just as important as having access to a studio. Facilitator Jessica Gelter of Arts Alive! noted the Sharon studio was not just a place where people worked, but a place “where people found home and found each other.”
About half of the attendees were sold on partnering with MAxT in some capacity, and used their discussion time to develop what a partnership could look like.
Roy Schlieben of MAxT said his organization could “take care of the infrastructure and administrative stuff so you can just focus on making,” in a potential partnership. Schlieben said he determined that MAxT could set up a 1,200 square foot ceramics studio for $50,000 or less. He mentioned the possibility of MAxT taking over the Sharon facility if there was a way to make it financially viable. The Sharon studio building is 7,000 square feet, which included office and former gallery space.
Discussing a potential partnership, many attendees expressed the desire for maintaining the identity of Sharon Arts Center, by adding longtime Sharon Arts Center members to the MAxT board of directors or maintaining the Sharon Arts name. One attendee remarked that the Makerspace was “very industrial,” and another said it lacked the charisma of the Sharon location. One drawback of the studio in Sharon was its seclusion. According to attendee Paul Tullier, “the future is being closer in [to a population center] than further out.” Several attendees expressed their appreciation of its more urban location and proximity to the high school, and some discussed using pop-up spaces for gallery events and other facility needs the Makerspace couldn’t immediately provide.
The second half of attendees were additionally willing to discuss keeping the building space in Sharon, or developing something outside of either the Sharon space or the MAxT makerspace. Those group discussions focused on how to develop the Sharon Arts Center into a financially viable operation, with the question “why didn’t it work [before]” coming up in several different discussions. Ceramicist Paul Looney presented his research on Sharon Arts Center’s financial models as well as those of several viable New England community studios, concluding that the Sharon Arts Center’s expenses had been much higher than some of the other facilities he’d studied.
Looney observed that artist memberships appeared to be central sources of income for other community studios, in addition to a diverse portfolio of fundraising sources.
One attendee noted that the ceramicists had more expensive equipment needs than some of the other kinds of artists in the Sharon Arts community, but, to her, the disparity in financial usage was besides the point of having a viable space for an artist community.
Among the list of needs that artists identified were: leadership for the upcoming decisions and actions, maintenance of the Sharon Arts Center identity, adequate studio space with proper amenities for all mediums that had been included at the Sharon studio, a conclusion on the new home for the anagama kiln that was built by John Baymore and students on the Sharon property in 2014, and a high level of member participation.
“When I opened the meeting, I said the things we really want to get from this are people who want to engage in the [upcoming] planning process… and a sense of what the community feels, wants, needs” about the physical space they need for their community, Gelter said on Thursday morning.
“We got both of those in spades,” she said, and that business plan writers stepped forward at the meeting, as well as people with experience in grantwriting, finance, lending, pop up infrastructure, and general volunteers.
The assembly was “a lot bigger than I was expecting,” said Gelter, even after hearing from more than sixty people in advance.
One of the most remarkable takeaways for Gelter was a closing remark: a speaker noted that Sharon Arts Center was at its healthiest in the 1970s, when crafting was in vogue and the membership was vibrant, young of age, and enthusiastic. Gelter said that attendee Carter Hammond suggested that the makerspace movement was the crafters movement reborn, in its energy, curiosity, and focus on exploration and rebellious ingenuity.
She said in the aftermath of the meeting, she would facilitate a session with a smaller group of people “who stepped forward and said they wanted to be a part of making this happen” to process notes and come up with more of a concrete plan, which they would share to the larger assembly. She said that community members who missed the meeting on Wednesday are still welcome to join that follow-up discussion by using the RSVP link to join the email list at: https://monadnockartsalive.org/changes-in-our-arts-community