professional membership

Featured Member

The Ventura County Arts Council has developed a program that engages local artists and partner organizations in an effort to promote the arts, community change, and engage new arts audiences in the Ventura community. The Artist in the Community Partnership Grants Program is part of a larger program called ArtsLIVE in Ventura County, sponsored by the Ventura County Arts Council in partnership with the Ventura County Community Foundation, and supported by the James Irvine Foundation’s Communities Advancing the Arts Initiative.

The Ventura County Arts Council is offering grants up to $5,000 to artists whose projects have artistic quality, imaginative scope, and interact with the community. The final outcome of the project must also address an issue or problem facing the Ventura community. The program is open to dancers, writers, actors, painters, sculptors, and other individual artists.

The Artist in the Community Partnership Grants Program gives artists a platform to bring community issues to a diverse audience. The arts can create bridges to convey messages to the community about important issues. One of the applicants is retired Ventura College art instructor, Hiroko Yoshimoto.  She has chosen to partner with the Ventura College Foundation for her project, titled “Rising from the Ashes.” Yoshimoto collected used charcoal from the Tea fire burn site to make large-scale drawings. “I have visited the aftermath of the devastation; I wanted to record and paint the charred remains of the woods and hillsides,” said Yoshimoto. She would also like to engage the service community of fire departments, fire victims, and ecology specialists through gallery talks and presentations to address.

The arts council is hoping this initiative will help them identify more supporters, donors, and partners for the arts in the county. “In order to do that, we need to engage people who have not had an encounter with the arts to demonstrate how the arts can address their issues, solve their problems, or help them meet their goals,” said Executive Director of the Ventura County Arts Council Margaret Travers.  “Those who have come forward for this grants program bring leadership and creative problem-solving skills to the partnership with the community group. We intend to demonstrate that the arts are vital to the well-being of our county.”

Travers stated, “The ultimate goal of this initiative is to show how the arts can interact with other sectors of the community to expand the horizons of those who would not otherwise experience them. The artists are creative thinkers; most of them care deeply about their communities. We are certain that they will be bringing us innovative approaches and solutions that will prove our contention that artists change communities.” Artists in the Community Partnership Grants Program is a great example of an arts organization leveraging the creative thinking resources in their community to foster partnerships with other nonprofits, bringing change into their community and generating new interest in the arts.