Members of the Santa Maria Arts Council hope to see some new faces at an upcoming mixer event—and bring some new artists into the fold.
Gale McNeeley, one of the event’s organizers and a longtime member of the Arts Council, said that the group’s goal is to recruit below-the-radar artists in the area and assist them in obtaining funding from local arts organizations.
“We would like to help give them work,” McNeeley said. “We have given, since 1965, over I think about $320,000 in grants to individual artists to help them in their careers.”
The Santa Maria Arts Council’s Community Arts Mixer will take place at the Ann Foxworthy Gallery on Friday, Dec. 2, and is described as a networking event for artists and supporters of the arts to meet in a fun, festive setting, with free refreshments and live music for guests to look forward to.
“The focus right now of the Arts Council is to find the artists and support the artists, because they’re kind of lost in the community,” said McNeeley, who hopes the mixer will draw in young artists and art students who are unfamiliar with the Arts Council. “This is supposed to be a way to get everybody together and say, ‘Who are you? What are you doing? What would you like to do? How can the Arts Council support you in doing that?’”
Representatives of local arts organizations—including Coastal Voices, Corazón del Pueblo, Youth ARTS Alive, and the Ian M. Hassett Foundation—will have tables set up during the event for attendees to stop by and find out about public art projects in the area, potential funding opportunities for artists, and arts scholarships available to students.
“We have a lot of possibilities for murals and youth arts education in the area, but none of this can really happen unless we can identify who are the artists in the field,” said McNeeley, who added that bringing in new artists to the Arts Council is just as beneficial to the group and the city of Santa Maria as it is to the recruits.
“The Arts Council needs a new infusion of energy and people right now to make it everything it can be,” McNeeley said. “We can all work together to create more art in the area and to encourage people to join together to do that. … Identifying the artists in town with the capability to create public art, whether it be performance art or visual art, is very important. We need to identify the people up front, and tell them these are their opportunities right now.”
McNeeley has been a member of the Santa Maria Arts Council for about a decade and is the founder of Youth ARTS Alive, a local nonprofit that offers free summer classes in visual and performing arts for kids ages 8 through 18.
The classes are held in person at multiple locations in Santa Maria. Before the pandemic, the Santa Maria Arts Council’s monthly meetings were also held in person.
Members of the Arts Council switched over to meeting via Zoom during the COVID-19 crisis, and continue to meet virtually. McNeeley said the group plans to switch back to in-person meetings soon, which he’s excited about.
McNeeley also said that the Arts Council plans to host new kinds of meetings that focus on specific art disciplines—to enable visual artists to collaborate with other visual artists and performing artists to collaborate with other performing artists, for example.
“This is about getting people back together again and reuniting the arts community,” McNeeley said. “It’s about getting the juices flowing and networking among artists and arts organizations.”
Keep the comments flowing with Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 1-8, 2022.
