Each of the carefully painted chairs that make up the Friends of the Santa Maria Public Library’s fourth annual Painted Chair Event at the Santa Maria Town Center Mall exudes its own distinct character. Some clearly depict the characters found in the book that accompanies each unique art piece, and others embody what their books are truly about. Simple seats evolve into something more, bound to a story’s narrative, evocative imagery.
The Painted Chair Event—co-sponsored this year by the People for Leisure and Youth Inc. (P.L.A.Y. Inc.)—is a popular show among local artists. Many of the contributing artists have participated in all four years of the event, and more join the volunteer effort each year. Joyce Hall, an event co-chair with Friends of the Santa Maria Public Library, said she’s signed up several artists for next year’s event while volunteering her time at the show, which opened on March 21.
“We already have a list of people who want to paint a chair next year; we have seven and we aren’t even a week into this,” she said. “They like the idea of tying together the book and the theme with the chair.”
In front of each chair sits a bucket for visitors to drop a ticket into; it’s a chance for them to win their favorite when the creations are raffled off on April 10. Proceeds from the event go entirely to the library’s book and equipment fund, Hall said.
“This is our biggest fundraiser; it’s very important,” she said. “The libraries have suffered from budget cuts in our city, just like everywhere else, and though some of that is starting to come back, the library’s budget is very low.”
A number of factors contributed to the dwindling funding for the Santa Maria Public Library system, which includes branches in Cuyama, Guadalupe, Orcutt, and soon in Los Alamos. According to stats posted by the California State Library on library.ca.gov, the Santa Maria Public Library’s income per capita is well below the average and median for the state. Friends volunteers, like Hall, see the show as offering more than just monetary support to the local library system, but also see it as a tool to raise local awareness of the importance and plight of the civic institution.
“I’m a supporter of all libraries, period,” Hall said. “Libraries are a major benefit to our community that is not fully recognized by the people who provide the funds to support them, and it’s important that other people hear about it and know that we are out here trying to raise money, because there is a shortfall of public funding for public and school libraries.”
The Painted Chair Event began four years ago when Altrusa International of Santa Maria started the creative fundraiser, co-sponsoring the event with the Friends and P.L.A.Y. Inc. and raising thousands of dollars for the library’s book fund. The Friends of the Santa Maria Public Library took the reins last year and still cosponsors the event with P.L.A.Y. Inc. Hall explained, though groups like Altrusa and others continue to support the event with sponsorships and other means.
Addressing the need
Santa Maria City Librarian Mary Housel announced the formation of the Santa Maria Public Library Foundation, a nonprofit 501c3 organization, in early February. The organization officially launched with a fundraising dinner on March 16, a sold out event with local authors Wendelin Van Draanen and Mark Parsons speaking.
The Santa Maria Public Library Foundation formed in order to start a pot of money that would benefit all branches of the Santa Maria Public Library, which are sorely in need of additional resources, Housel explained.
“The ideal of the foundation is to build that endowment fund to support things like after-school homework centers, online tutoring services, and some of the more expensive technologies that the library needs to keep up with the future,” she said.
The total expenditures per capita of the Santa Maria Public Library dropped each year from 2008 through 2011, according to state statistics, with a small increase for the 2012-2013 fiscal year. Housel explained the decreases were due in part to the loss of several state funding sources that were beneficial to the library system, such as the Public Library Fund, which included a transaction-based reimbursement program.
“With the transaction-based reimbursement, if people that lived outside our service area came here and borrowed our books at a higher rate than the people who live here go out to other areas and borrow their books, the state would do a net to net comparison, and Santa Maria always came out as a net lender, believe it or not, and then we would get more money from the state,” she said. “When the Public Library Fund ended, so did the transaction-based reimbursement, so that really put us in the hole, and then the recession was happening at the same time, and we’ve never seemed to pull out of it.”
With meager funding coming from the state, and less than average allocations from local government sources, the Santa Maria Public Library has been pressed hard. Increases in the minimum wage, raising operational costs, and mandated salary increases have coalesced into a perfect storm of depletion for the library’s budget. These issues were the impetus for forming the Santa Maria Public Library Foundation—as well as putting on the Painted Chair Event.
“Something has to give because if there is no increase being granted from the county or the city, then we suffer, and we respond by holding positions vacant or not buying equipment we need to get, or cutting back the book budget,” she said. “And then you say, well, I guess we need to keep working with all these nonprofit groups that help us so much, and thankfully the library has a pretty dedicated group of people that love to fund the things we do, so we do really well that way and are thankful for that.”
In an effort to raise awareness and pledge support for the library system and the Santa Maria Public Library Foundation, the Santa Maria City Council and the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors declared 2015 the Year of the Library. Whether or not the Year of the Library will include an increase of funding is still a question for Housel, who has seen the funding drop continuously since she began as city librarian.
“It’s probably going to go down over the next fiscal year unless the Board of Supervisors votes for an increase,” she said. “We’d love for them to at least give a cost of living increase.”
In the meantime, volunteers across several organizations are participating in the Painted Chair Event, using the public show to leverage community awareness of the library’s situation. Support has come from the Santa Maria Public Library Foundation, city employees, businesses, and local politicians who view the library as a valuable cultural asset.
A place for everyone
The Painted Chair Event includes $100 sponsorships donated before the show begins. Donors included local businesses, nonprofit organizations, individuals, and families. Altrusa International of Santa Maria president-elect Isa Ponce-Jimenez went beyond just her sponsorship and also donated a chair she painted this year.
A caterpillar and butterfly adorn the chair she painted based on the children’s book La Mariposa by Francisco Jimenez. The acrylic paints depicting the book’s creatures is a departure from Ponce-Jimenez’s artistic comfort zone, she explained.
“I had never used acrylics before—my forte is watercolors, but you can’t do watercolors on a chair,” she said. “So I had to teach myself how to do this with the chair, and I like the way it came out.”
Ponce-Jimenez and her friends have already filled the chair’s jar with many raffle tickets, as she hopes to actually gift the chair to its author if she wins it. Based on the author’s own life, the book tells the story of a young boy, a child of migrant farmworkers who doesn’t speak English and feels isolated and hopeless in an American school. A kind teacher reaches out to the boy with the gift of a pupa in a jar. The boy discovers a passion for learning and is transformed by the experience, just like the butterfly that emerges from the cocoon.
Jimenez is now a professor at Santa Clara University, and his book and life story serve as a powerful reminder regarding the importance of education and literacy in a young person’s life, Ponce-Jimenez said. Also a former director for the Central Coast Literacy Council, Ponce-Jimenez contends that literacy and engagement in education provide young people with the best set of tools to achieve success in their lives, as well as supporting a healthier society.
“You can lose money or material things, but the education you get, nobody can take that away from you,” she said. “I always hoped that one day the Literacy Council would not be needed anymore because I think that a community that is educated is a very healthy community in every respect.”
The Santa Maria Public Library Foundation hopes to bring library services to Northern Santa Barbara County’s more underserved populations in the form of better branch support and possibly a mobile book program. These communities are already the target of the Central Coast Literacy Council, Altrusa International of Santa Maria, and Altrusa International of the Central Coast.
The concerted goal of all these organizations is to garner a culture of reading among the Spanish speaking, bilingual, and English speaking populations in the area. Fundraisers like the Friends of the Santa Maria Public Library’s annual Painted Chair Event are designed to do more than support the library, but also raise cultural awareness of the importance of reading, literacy, and the library’s role in achieving those.
“We need to highlight the importance of the library, especially today, when everybody thinks technology is everything,” Ponce-Jimenez said. “You have to have a very strong basic background so you can build on that foundation, so we’re trying to make reading more popular, books more accessible, and knowledge more famous.”
The Painted Chair Event also offers a dynamic reminder of the creative legacy that has a home at the library. From the Shepard Hall art gallery to live performances funded by the Friends of the Santa Maria Public Library, the library is the community’s epicenter of cultural expression and understanding.
“We are very much about supporting culture, and when we have the Painted Chair Event, it kind of emphasizes the artsy creativity that libraries very much promote,” said City Librarian Housel. “It kind of brings everyone together in a common, great cause that will uplift the whole community, and it brings attention to the library publicly, which can help gain momentum moving forward so the library is recognized for the true asset it is to the community.”
Contact Art Editor Joe Payne at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 2-9, 2015.
