Saturday, June 9, 2018
Why are the arts important? I’m asked this question quite a bit.
I’ve changed my answer recently.
It’s not just about creative thinking and problem solving. It’s not just about giving our students opportunities to learn job skills, local history, and environmental advocacy. It’s not about giving economic options and vitality to our rural area. It’s all those things, but more.
It’s a emotional lifeline- particularly for today’s young people.
When we hear the poetry and essays, particularly of middle and high school students that participate in our monthly Coffeehouses (which have themselves been happening for decades), we understand that creative expression helps us heal and connect. We learn that the traumas that students experience- in their families and friend groups- are more common than we’d like to believe. We’re fortunate to help provide a safe, supportive community in which these artists can share.
Perry County Council of the Arts (PCCA) has been connecting our community through the arts since 1982. Our recently updated three-year strategic plan points to our intent to more fully engage with our community and to address community issues and concerns through the arts.
Our legacy is borne through generations that have experienced our support and encouragement to create. We created our annual Perry County Youth Art Day to do exactly this. We have built a network of programming, projects, relationships, and partnerships in Perry, Juniata, Mifflin, Snyder, Union, Northumberland, and Huntingdon Counties. We serve all ages, all abilities—student, hobbyist, and professional. What we have learned is that all people share the creative impulse. We just demonstrate it in different ways. It’s no surprise. Design and art influence every part of every day, whether we are aware of its influence or not. Art is a shared experience. It’s important to remember the ways in which we are interconnected.
“Art as Social Healing” is a special call for art at PCCA Gallery. We're looking for art, but we need it by June 12.
Our PCCA Gallery on the square in Newport exists for the support and development of our 189 active PCCA member artists of all ages and abilities who live and work throughout Pennsylvania. Some are hobbyists, and some make their living through creating. “Art of Social Healing” arose from the inspirations and creative urges of some of our member artists, who demonstrate the values of solidarity, empathy, and intuition in their art forms. Ultimately, our entrants will examine how art can heal, connect, and bind us together.
In our complex, world of polarizing social conflict and personal trauma, it can be challenging to find ways of coping with stress and anxiety and to affect constructive dialogue.
Art is a powerful tool that people have used historically to vocalize their position in the world addressing major social issues. It is also a healing tool for those struggling with addiction, abuse, depression and debilitating illnesses. Artists are inspired by those things that bring us healing—time in nature, storytelling and story circles. Art helps us tell our stories, and helps us heal individually and as part of our interconnected web of life.
James O’Dea’s “The Social Healing Project” of 2011 describes social healing as guided not by revenge, retribution or punishment, but rather by the compassionate response of relating to all people...as inextricably connected, and as wounded by past hurts, including the built-in, often invisible social codes woven into the old story.” O’dea relates the African worldview of Ubuntu- “‘I am because you are,’ all things exist as a communion of subjects, not an assortment of objects.” Bringing science into the equation, O’dea notes that “the science of energy fields shows us that with intention focused on positive emotions like love, compassion, and peacefulness, we can cohere the energetic field of the human heart with others’ and support ever greater fields of positive, healing energy.”
This exhibition has brought our county’s social service groups and ministerial groups together in resounding support. This community-oriented exhibition will open the evening of Friday, July 6.
On Saturday, July 7, 2018, the exhibition will be open to the public for “Discover Newport Day." Last year’s event brought together hundreds to celebrate our veterans during the dedication ceremony of our community-created mural administered by PCCA through our Arts in Education partnership with Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and with the talents and drive of Newport High School and teaching artist Jon Laidacker.
Our exhibition will feature a collection of creative works by Central PA artists and demonstrate how people process these issues for therapeutic release, social dialogue, and in some cases, to affect change and transformation. We welcome visual art, ready for hanging, as well as video, poetry/prose, dance, and music. All entries must be accompanied by an artist’s statement, and these pieces should be appropriate for demonstrating/viewing in the family-friendly setting of PCCA Gallery. More information on this call for art is at http://www.perrycountyarts.org/call-for-artists/
and on Facebook.
Why are the arts important? I’m asked this question quite a bit.
I’ve changed my answer recently.
It’s not just about creative thinking and problem solving. It’s not just about giving our students opportunities to learn job skills, local history, and environmental advocacy. It’s not about giving economic options and vitality to our rural area. It’s all those things, but more.
It’s a emotional lifeline- particularly for today’s young people.
When we hear the poetry and essays, particularly of middle and high school students that participate in our monthly Coffeehouses (which have themselves been happening for decades), we understand that creative expression helps us heal and connect. We learn that the traumas that students experience- in their families and friend groups- are more common than we’d like to believe. We’re fortunate to help provide a safe, supportive community in which these artists can share.
Perry County Council of the Arts (PCCA) has been connecting our community through the arts since 1982. Our recently updated three-year strategic plan points to our intent to more fully engage with our community and to address community issues and concerns through the arts.
Our legacy is borne through generations that have experienced our support and encouragement to create. We created our annual Perry County Youth Art Day to do exactly this. We have built a network of programming, projects, relationships, and partnerships in Perry, Juniata, Mifflin, Snyder, Union, Northumberland, and Huntingdon Counties. We serve all ages, all abilities—student, hobbyist, and professional. What we have learned is that all people share the creative impulse. We just demonstrate it in different ways. It’s no surprise. Design and art influence every part of every day, whether we are aware of its influence or not. Art is a shared experience. It’s important to remember the ways in which we are interconnected.
“Art as Social Healing” is a special call for art at PCCA Gallery. We're looking for art, but we need it by June 12.
Our PCCA Gallery on the square in Newport exists for the support and development of our 189 active PCCA member artists of all ages and abilities who live and work throughout Pennsylvania. Some are hobbyists, and some make their living through creating. “Art of Social Healing” arose from the inspirations and creative urges of some of our member artists, who demonstrate the values of solidarity, empathy, and intuition in their art forms. Ultimately, our entrants will examine how art can heal, connect, and bind us together.
In our complex, world of polarizing social conflict and personal trauma, it can be challenging to find ways of coping with stress and anxiety and to affect constructive dialogue.
Art is a powerful tool that people have used historically to vocalize their position in the world addressing major social issues. It is also a healing tool for those struggling with addiction, abuse, depression and debilitating illnesses. Artists are inspired by those things that bring us healing—time in nature, storytelling and story circles. Art helps us tell our stories, and helps us heal individually and as part of our interconnected web of life.
James O’Dea’s “The Social Healing Project” of 2011 describes social healing as guided not by revenge, retribution or punishment, but rather by the compassionate response of relating to all people...as inextricably connected, and as wounded by past hurts, including the built-in, often invisible social codes woven into the old story.” O’dea relates the African worldview of Ubuntu- “‘I am because you are,’ all things exist as a communion of subjects, not an assortment of objects.” Bringing science into the equation, O’dea notes that “the science of energy fields shows us that with intention focused on positive emotions like love, compassion, and peacefulness, we can cohere the energetic field of the human heart with others’ and support ever greater fields of positive, healing energy.”
This exhibition has brought our county’s social service groups and ministerial groups together in resounding support. This community-oriented exhibition will open the evening of Friday, July 6.
On Saturday, July 7, 2018, the exhibition will be open to the public for “Discover Newport Day." Last year’s event brought together hundreds to celebrate our veterans during the dedication ceremony of our community-created mural administered by PCCA through our Arts in Education partnership with Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and with the talents and drive of Newport High School and teaching artist Jon Laidacker.
Our exhibition will feature a collection of creative works by Central PA artists and demonstrate how people process these issues for therapeutic release, social dialogue, and in some cases, to affect change and transformation. We welcome visual art, ready for hanging, as well as video, poetry/prose, dance, and music. All entries must be accompanied by an artist’s statement, and these pieces should be appropriate for demonstrating/viewing in the family-friendly setting of PCCA Gallery. More information on this call for art is at http://www.perrycountyarts.org/call-for-artists/
and on Facebook.
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