Sculpture by Aubrey Charnell, one of three local artists selected for the Art + Climate project.
Rowena Belcher, Board Chair
Dr. Edna Varner, Treasurer
Vanessa Jackson, Secretary
Dr. Andrea Becksvoort
John Beder
Ella Clark
Carmen Davis
Olga de Klein
Patti Frierson
Lacey Furr
Andrew Hibbard
ARTSBUILD STAFF
James McKissic, President
Sallie Lawrence, Director of Finance
Caroline Bulman, Development Manager
Melissa Astin, Manager of Grants and Community Engagement
Miles Huff
Kristy Huntley
Dr. Quincy Jenkins
Bryan Kelly
Sharon Law
Dr. Jill Levine
Alex Loza
Toya Moore
Daniela Peterson
Jared Pickens
David Spiller
Michael Stone
Angela Stoudemire
Caroline Walker
Brianna Jones, Grants and Programs Coordinator
Jules Jackson, Programs Assistant
Jonathan Dean, Administrative Coordinator
Take Action for the Arts
There are so many ways to be supportive of ChattanoogaHamilton County’s artists and nonprofit arts and cultural sector. Here are just a few suggested action items for advocacy, activism, and amplification:
Get involved with local arts initiatives by donating, attending performances and exhibits.
Dear ArtsBuild Donors,
Building Stronger Communities Through the Arts—for 55 years ArtsBuild has worked in Chattanooga-Hamilton County to do just that. I think about this a lot and how ArtsBuild has been instrumental in building stronger arts advocates as well. Some people might not know that I was in the first cohort of the Holmberg Arts Leadership Institute and I served on ArtsBuild’s Board twice. I have seen first hand how the organization has been transformational in my life and helped me to connect to the many arts organizations and passionate arts supporters in our region. Not only am I the President of ArtsBuild, but I’m also a donor and a beneficiary, too!
BY
The arts are vital to our City, contributing to the local economy and our overall quality of life in the Tennessee Valley. I’ve spent the past few months evangelizing about the economic impact of the arts from Chamber councils to civic groups to classrooms. According to the Arts and Economic Prosperity 6 study which ArtsBuild completed with Americans for the Arts and the Tennessee Arts Commission, our local nonprofit arts and culture sector contributes $191 million to the Hamilton County economy and supports over 3,000 jobs. Though consistently and severely underfunded, the arts sector pays huge dividends, the evidence of which is seen in any Chattanooga community calendar or by driving through our city on a summer evening. From buskers to small music venues to murals to ballet in the park, our city is alive with a vibrancy and energy that simply would not exist without the wonderful artists and arts organizations that call Chattanooga and Hamilton County home.
In this issue we have so much to share—from new programs using the arts to engage community members around some of the most pressing issues of the day to old favorites which continue to serve folks of all ages with high quality arts experiences. We hope you enjoy Muse and have a great summer, and don’t forget to #ArtsVote in 2024! We can’t do any of the work we do at ArtsBuild without your support. Thank you!
Sincerely,
Purchase a Tennessee specialty license plate. A portion of the funds generated by specialty license
plates supports the Tennessee Arts Commission, which gives grants to artists and arts organizations throughout Hamilton County.
Vote for candidates who support the arts and who acknowledge the great work that artists and arts organizations are doing to lift up our local economy.
Register to vote or check your voter registration at ovr.govote.tn.gov
Allied
PHOTO
JOHN ADAMS
DR. ROLAND CARTER VINCENT OAKES
DR. CARTER’S artistic achievements are nothing short of legendary. Yet for him, music has always been a means of connecting to and lifting up people, a belief he returns to when reflecting on his career as an educator.
“Teaching has been just part of it, not only in terms of music but in terms of leadership skills. I was never teaching music. I was teaching students.”
THROUGH THE relentless creativity and advocacy of arts educators like Vincent Oakes, generations of Chattanoogans yet to come will know the same kind of appreciation and support.
“It brings me great joy to be able to recognize the work that’s being done with children and for children, because the arts need to have a future.”
The annual Ruth Holmberg Arts Leadership Award recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions to the arts in Chattanooga and who are actively engaged in the cultural life of our community— “Arts Builders” who exemplify ArtsBuild’s mission to build a stronger community through the arts as demonstrated by their significant contributions to the arts and their leadership.
PEGGY WOOD TOWNSEND STAN TOWNSEND
FOR THE TOWNSENDS, founders of Townsend Atelier, a school, gallery, and materials store—art is not something that hangs on a wall or remains in a studio: it’s a way of connecting to the community around them, particularly where people of diverse backgrounds and interests come together. Perhaps no one understood that more deeply than their friend Ruth Holmberg, for whom the Arts Leadership Award is named.
“We both worked with Ruth a lot,”
says Peggy. “She was on my public art committee for years and she collected Stan’s artwork. We both knew what an incredible person and advocate for Chattanooga she was. She taught so many of us how cultural our city can be.”
“I hear people all the time just talking about what a great place Chattanooga is,” Peggy says. “Certainly we are just a couple of people that have been involved, but our fingerprints are on a lot of the city. That’s really rewarding.”
The 2023 awards were presented at the first annual ArtsBuild InterMission, an unforgettable evening celebrating the impact of the arts in the Chattanooga community and honoring the recipients of the Ruth Holmberg Arts Leadership Awards.
SAVE DATE | 9.25
Mark your calendars for Intermission 2024 —Wednesday, September 25th sponsored by EPB, Edge Capital Group, Chattanooga Times Free Press, LDG Development LLC and Reagan Advertising.
RUTH HOLMBERG
PHOTOS BY JOSEPH SCHLABS
The Chattanooga Art + Climate Project supports bold new works of art that start important conversations about the environmental risk factors that impact neighborhoods along the Rossville Boulevard corridor.
Our creative team includes New York-based artist Adam Frelin, and a cohort of three local artists: Andy Ramirez, Aubrey Charnell, and Chase Guajardo. They each have created a temporary artwork that will be featured in a series of summer engagements to serve as a beacon to draw people to learn about the particular climate issues, heat islands and flooding, that affect us most aggressively in Chattanooga–Hamilton County. This project is supported by the Lyndhurst Foundation.
X Bridge Over Troubled Water
– SIMON AND GARFUNKEL
X Hot Fun in the Summertime
– SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE
X Love is Like a Heatwave
– MARTHA AND THE VANDELLAS
X Purple Rain - PRINCE
X Summertime – DJ JAZZY JEFF AND THE FRESH PRINCE
X Sun is Shining – BOB MARLEY
X Take Me to the River – AL GREEN
X The Heat is On – GLENN FREY
X Water Music
– GEORGE FREDERICK HANDEL
X Waterfalls - TLC
Rising Action
Rising Action is a public art experience about natural forces that affect us all.
Adam is the lead visionary behind Rising Action. He has shown widely at venues such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and received numerous awards.
He has published two books of photography and has had several public artworks commissioned throughout the world. Most notably, he and his team were awarded a $1 million Public Art Challenge grant through Bloomberg Philanthropies for which Frelin was Lead Artist on Breathing Lights, a multi-city temporary art installation.
Rising Action also features original sound design by Summer Dreggs (Carl Cadwell), and lanterns by Playful Evolving Monsters.
ADAMFRELIN.COM
ADAM FRELIN
Nuestra Tierra
ANDY RAMIREZ
Nuestra Tierra addresses the marginalization of Rossville’s community and aims to create a platform for environmental stewardship through Latin-centric art.
The first phase involves constructing a 16ft Mesoamerican pyramid as a symbolic centerpiece for community events, promoting representation and connection to the landscape.
The second phase focuses on creating a children’s book to educate Latino children about their heritage’s connection to Chattanooga’s ecosystem, emphasizing neotropical birds and their migration patterns.
By engaging both children and adults, this two-part initiative aims to resonate effectively and promote awareness of our relationship with nature.
Andy Ramirez’s work exists in the space of digital photography, the style of which relies on the manipulation of light and focus. He captures a moment and keeps the editing to a minimum and pushes and pulls the subject from the background and creates a three-dimensional effect that gives his work its signature look.
ANDYRAMIREZPHOTOGRAPHY.COM
Portraits and Seasons of the Boulevard
AUBREY CHARNELL
Portraits and Seasons of the Boulevard will be a series of community-led paintings that will become the background for sculptural portraits of the Rossville Boulevard community members.
For me, at the heart of the Art + Climate project, our goal is to create more connection: more connection to our environment and climate, and more connection in our community.
By giving people the time to create a painting to become a part of the final display, I hope to foster an environment where we can all connect with each other and then later can see ourselves reflected in the artwork.
Aubrey Charnell is a classically trained figurative sculptor specializing in the human figure using clay cast into bronze, resin, or plaster.
AUBREYCHARNELL.COM
The Alebrije Project
Alebrijes are a traditional Mexican Folk art that depicts colorful patterned animals who are known to guard and protect the environments they live in.
For The Alebrije Project, I am going to make several large ceramic Alebrijes representing native Tennessee animal species. These animals will then be placed to watch over and help promote the hard-working nonprofit organizations that live and work along the Rossville Corridor.
Chase Guajardo is a ceramic artist and printmaker who specializes in the Mexican folk art of Alebrijes. The textured animals she creates are, from her perspective, friendly protectors of areas that need protecting.
GUAJARDOCHASE.WIXSITE.COM/MYSITE
CHASE GUAJARDO
Periscope Entrepreneur Training
Twenty-three incredible artists completed training to develop sustainable business models for their creative careers as part of ArtsBuild’s Periscope Program. ArtsBuild hosted the inaugural Periscope Chattanooga Pitch Night and Artist Entrepreneur Showcase at R.I.S.E. During this event, six artists had the opportunity to present their final pitch, vying for a chance to win prize money.
The grand prize of $5,000 was awarded to Courtney Cox, Founder of Courtney M. Cox Designs. Additional winners included Sarah Mixon, Founder of Night + Day, at $2,500, and Katheryn Hande, CEO of The Maker Studio, at $1,000. Overall more than $10,000 in cash and business services were given out!
We appreciate the arts and entrepreneurial community supporting the program as judges, coaches, and mentors—Sarah Mattson, City of Chattanooga’s Director of Entrepreneurship; Dionne Jenkins, Tennessee Valley Federal Credit Union’s Vice President of Corporate Engagement, Dejuan Jordan, Co-CEO
Partners in Education and Any Given Child
The arts find their way into elementary, middle, and high school classrooms and community programs every day in a variety of ways. Our Partners in Education (PIE) team—including the Arts-Based Collaborative at UTC, WTCI, the Chattanooga Theatre Centre, and Hamilton County Schools—will host our Arts Integration Summer Camp for teachers and youth workers this summer at UTC. The summer camp is facilitated by our PIE team along with three professional teaching artists. Over sixty Hamilton County Schools teachers, youth development workers, and teaching artists are signed up to participate!
Louie Marin-Howard (The Pop-up Project) and Carolyn Dorfman (Carolyn Dorfman Dance Company) are on board to work with area educators
of Launch Chattanooga; Arthur Lamon, Arthur Lamon Design; Stacy Martin, Entrepreneur and Owner of Seahorse Snacks; Malcolm Harris, CLN Worldwide’s Director of Talent Acquisition; and Hannah Lancaster, United Way of Greater Chattanooga’s Director of Nonprofit Support and Innovation.
Periscope Pitch Night was sponsored by Tennessee Valley Federal Credit Union. Other funders and partners include Arts & Business Council of Greater Nashville, Benwood Foundation, City of Chattanooga, Office of Arts, Culture,
this fall. ArtsBuild’s Partners in Education network and programming is supported by the Kennedy Center and the Tennessee Arts Commission.
and Creative Economy, Cumulus Media, R.I.S.E. Chattanooga, River City Company, The Howard Fund via the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga, The Nancy Lackey Community Education Fund, Sankofa Civic Engagement Fund, and United Way of Greater Chattanooga. Applications for Periscope’s 2nd cohort hosted by ArtsBuild will open on June 28.
For more information about Periscope and the opportunities it offers to artists and entrepreneurs in Chattanooga, visit artsbuild.com/programs.
Imagine!
This school year we provided Imagine! field trips for almost 12,000 students! The arts teach students innumerable lessons—practice makes perfect, small differences can have large effects, collaboration leads to creativity. The arts also teach children there are several paths to take when approaching problems and all problems can have more than one solution.
And yet, despite the impressive benefits of arts education, not every student has access to these quality learning experiences, which is why for more than ten years, ArtsBuild has been ensuring students have incredible arts experiences! Since its inception, the Imagine! program has provided arts field trips for over 100,000 Hamilton County School students at no cost to the schools or families. We appreciate the continued support of the following funders to this program: Beacon Foundation Charitable Trust, Schillhahn-Huskey Foundation, City of Chattanooga, Lillian L. Colby Foundation, Hamico Foundation, George R. Johnson Family Foundation and Tucker Foundation.
(Top) Teachers participate in a shadow puppet workshop.
Artist Work Grants
The latest round of the Artists Work Grants were awarded earlier this year. The Artists Work Grants program provides funding to individual artists, artist studios, and non-profit arts organizations to produce artworks for public spaces in Chattanooga. Funding for the program was provided by the Lyndhurst Foundation, Benwood Foundation, and individual ArtsBuild donors. Since the program began in October 2020, 32 awards have been made totaling $274,000.
In this round, a total of $42,000 was awarded to the following six recipients (selected by the review committee from among 47 applications): Holly Morse-Ellington, Kanika Jones, Dagan Beckett, Ryan Laskowski, Nicole Nichols, and Andrea Solis Tankersley.
Equity Grants
In February, ArtsBuild announced the eight local artists receiving awards from the 2024 Equity Grants for Individual Artists program—Hiliary Blalock, Gabrieli Garcia, Briah Gober, Rita Lorraine Hubbard, Keelah Jackson, Jazmine LeBlanc, Iantha Newton, and LaSha’ Rockymore-Mitchell.
The Equity Grants program was designed to provide more equitable grant funding in our community. Since 2021 the program has awarded $200,000 in total to 24 artists who live
and work in Hamilton County. The latest round of grants was eligible for BIPOC women artists in Hamilton County. Grant funding was available in three categories: Artist Works, Equipment, and Professional Development. The Equity Grants program is made possible with gifts from individual donors, Lyndhurst Foundation, and Benwood Foundation.
In FY 2025 we will be awarding Individual Artist Grants to local artists with disabilities, so help us spread the word!
Arts Leadership
The Holmberg Arts Leadership Institute is one of ArtsBuild’s most beloved programs, launched in 2005 in memory of long-time board member and arts advocate A. William Holmberg, Jr. Participants enjoy exclusive behind-thescenes visits to cultural and educational institutions and an always-growing shared network of friends and colleagues.
In 2024, our biggest-ever class of Holmies graduated after a full year of visiting some of Chattanooga’s most impactful arts and cultural institutions. The graduation ceremony featured a keynote address by Peggy Douglas, Ph.D., a master playwright, performance poet, college professor, musician—and fellow Holmie! Our class of 2025 will begin July 18, 2024 with an opening ceremony at Outdoor Chattanooga and the Association for Visual Arts.
Holly Morse-Ellington, for Next Exit Productions, to host a festival showcasing eight 10-minute plays by local playwrights.
Kanika Jones for “The Urban Echo,” a dynamic youth literacy initiative that immerses children in poetry and performance art.
Dagan Beckett for “Legacy: America,” a film exploring the intersection of pioneering the American frontier by steam engine and the impact trains have had on the lives of individuals on the autism spectrum.
Scenic City Shakespeare for “Macbeth,” a production directed by Ryan Laskowski of Shakespeare’s familiar tale of ambition and fate that will incorporate Appalachian Folklore and connect the heritage of the Tennessee Valley.
Nicole Nichols for the Clay Makers’ Collective, a 6-month program to give eight individuals of diverse backgrounds the chance to explore the art of ceramics at Scenic City Clay Arts, culminating in an exhibit at The Arts Building.
Andrea Solis Tankersley Louie MarinHoward and The Pop-up Project for “¡Expresate!,” a series of dance classes offered in Spanish at Crabtree Farms and La Paz.
Thank you cards from third grade students who attended the CSO’s Young People’s Concert in February 2024 as part of the Imagine! program.
2024 ANNUAL CAMPAIGN
Your gift supports the arts
Thanks to everyone who has already made their annual gift or pledge to the 2024 Annual Campaign! Your gift allows us to fulfill our mission of building stronger communities through the arts. If you haven’t yet made your gift or pledge, please consider doing that soon! It is only through the generosity of our donors that ArtsBuild is able to support our arts community in the many ways you’ve read about in this newsletter.
PLANNED GIVING
Have you thought about a monthly recurring donation? It’s easy to set up using our online donation form. Check it out at artsbuild.com, or give us a call at 423-777-4213.
Do you have a neighbor, friend, or colleague who loves the arts? Encourage them to join you in supporting the arts!
A great choice: IRA Qualified Charitable Distributions
There are many ways to make charitable gifts that benefit both you as the donor and the causes you choose to support. One alternative to an outright cash gift that is applicable to donors age 701/2 years or older is to make a qualified charitable distribution, which is an otherwise taxable distribution from an IRA. Making this gift directly to a qualified charity like ArtsBuild can also satisfy all or part of your required minimum distribution.
Have you considered naming ArtsBuild in your will? Many types of planned gifts are simple and easy to set up. If you are curious to learn more, contact your financial advisor or feel free to reach out to us for more information at caroline@artsbuild.com
No matter the size, planned and alternative gifts like a qualified charitable IRA distribution make a difference!
RENEW YOUR GIFT AT ARTSBUILD.COM/ DONATE
The first Arts Leadership Award recognizes Ruth Holmberg for her extraordinary support of the arts and cultural community in Chattanooga over
