On Thursday evening the front room of The ArtsCenter in Carrboro was filled with community members chatting, enjoying snacks and admiring the art to celebrate the center's fiftieth anniversary. Founder Jacques Menache's self-portrait was featured in the gallery and on t-shirts worn by attendees and organizers.
During the event, Carrboro Mayor Barbara Foushee read a town proclamation declaring the day, August 15, as The ArtsCenter Day in Carrboro, “to honor the 50 years of service to the people of Carrboro and to recognize their contributions to our community.”
The organization's Executive Director Wendy Smith said Menache's vision of Carrboro as a creative community has really grown since he founded the center in 1974.
“Since then, we’ve grown from a one-room art school into an 18,000 square foot multidisciplinary facility," she said. "We serve people of all ages — we have arts camp, we have after school, we have an adult art school, we do performances, we do outreach to local schools. We've started to do outreach to some of the retirement communities, so we're really trying to serve everybody."
Some of the classes offered by The ArtsCenter, Smith said, include traditional classes such as ceramics, painting and sewing, while others incorporate newer technologies like 3D printing.
Taryn Revoir, the Ceramics Studio Coordinator at The ArtsCenter, said that continually finding new ways to connect with the community is a priority for the organization.
“I think it’s really exciting and hard for a nonprofit organization to survive in the world, especially after 50 years,” Revoir said. “I think it just speaks to the level of commitment that the people who work at this place have toward providing arts organizations for the public, and experiential education is so important for adults especially. And we provide that, and it’s so cool.”
The anniversary ceremony also included an unveiling of an angel sculpture to celebrate the new ArtsCenter facility at 400 Roberson St., where the nonprofit relocated last year. The sculpture was designed by Bob Gaston for a production of "Look Homeward Angel" at UNC before coming to the ArtsCenter. It has embodied the center's creative spirit since.
Lane Wurster, co-founder of the Carrboro marketing and design agency The Splinter Group, said that the unveiling of the angel is significant both for the history of The ArtsCenter and also for the future.
