The Sharon Arts community has rebranded as Sharing Arts, and has begun collaborations with MAxT Makerspace, local libraries, and the Dublin School in an effort to meet the local artist community’s needs following the closing the Sharon Arts Center this past summer.
A new, decentralized network of community art classes are being scheduled under the name of Sharing Arts, two months after the last Community Conversation on local artists’ needs in the wake of Sharon Arts’ closure in August 2019.
“Sharing Arts” is a deliberate play on Sharon Arts, local artist Kimberly Kersey-Asbury said, to speak to a sense of continuity between the groups. The entity formed out of the core participants in the fall’s Community Conversations, she said. The organization, and the classes it’s been offering, are tangible steps towards filling artists’ unmet needs.
Currently, Sharing Arts classes are insured under MAxT Makerspace’s umbrella, but they are exploring 501c3 status, and expect to begin accumulating savings from art classes in their own account. “We want it to be Sharon Arts without the mortgage,” Kersey-Asbury said, as there is currently no budget or assets among the group of artists displaced by the closure of the Sharon community studio.
Area artists still need a reliable community ceramics and textile studio space, Kersey-Asbury said, and more local venues to display and sell their art. Kersey-Asbury said she’s been looking into potential sites for a more permanent ceramics and textile studio space, including sites in Peterborough’s Shieling Forest, the Dublin Village Park, and in Wilton.
Sharing Arts has found a willing collaborator in the Dublin School, according to visual arts instructor and Putnam Gallery curator Earl Schofield. He and Head of school Brad Bates were inspired to reach out to the artist community after reading this newspaper’s article on the artist community’s needs as expressed through this fall’s Community Conversations. Schofield said the school has high interest in connecting more with the greater community, and are in talks to work out how the school can offer their gallery space and classroom space to the region’s artistic community.
The Putnam Gallery has been committed to displaying the art of living artists in an educational format, Schofield said, but he wants to encourage more local artists to engage. Kersey-Asbury, who teaches at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, spoke to the unique and often underutilized niche that schools’ art galleries can fill for artists seeking places to expose the public to their work. “Some artists said they couldn’t get into existing shows,” she said, and that the collaboration with the Putnam Gallery, in which she and Schofield would serve as co-curators, provides artists with a vetted, juried space to display work. Although it’s not a commercial space, they said, it’s easy enough for potential patrons to contact the artist for sales information. Schofield hopes the gallery could be hosting new member exhibitions and exhibits related to MAxT classes this summer.
The school’s administration is also negotiating how to potentially open up its ceramics studio, kiln, and digital lab for photography for adult visual art classes. This wouldn’t take the place of a permanent ceramics studio for the Sharing Arts community, Kersey-Asbury said, but could help to perpetuate classes in the meantime. Dublin School currently hosts youth and adult composers from around the world as part of the Walden School programming.
Winter and spring art classes have been scheduled at the MAxT Makerspace in Peterborough, as well as a number of local libraries. Figure drawing opportunities are ongoing at the Makerspace, and a recent printmaking workshop took place at the library in Dublin. Kersey-Asbury would like to see classes continue to occur in a number of different locations, and envisions a map like the one provided by the Monadnock Art Tour helping community members quickly identify where they can go for what kinds of classes and studio opportunities.
Upcoming classes include ceramics, woodworking, stone carving and zine making.