Giving Back: Community Spirit

Many of us may find ourselves using the term “starving artists” off-handedly, never really giving thought to how the creatives among us really earn their daily bread, much less purchase their supplies. Indeed, to the casual observer, art appears as an effortless finished product, with no hint of the hours of toil that went into it. But the staff at the Metropolitan Arts Council (MAC) knows.

And they’ve been working, just as tirelessly as the artists, to provide support.
In 2008 they awarded a record high of $249,958 to Greenville’s cultural community, says Alan Ethridge, executive director of the organization. That represents an increase of more than 30 percent from 2007. “This is the backbone of what we do,” Ethridge asserts. He explains how these general-operations grants currently support nine arts organizations in Greenville, providing a significant source of unrestricted income. And the goal is to expand funding every year.

But that is just one of MAC’s ambitions. Another is to continue to grow Greenville Open Studios, a wildly popular event that started in 2002 in which the public can visit artists in their unique creative environments. Ethridge notes that more than 36,000 visits were recorded in 2008, the most in its six-year history. “We also had the highest percentage of tourist participation ever, with people from western North Carolina and Georgia coming into the city to attend,” says Ethridge.

Other evidence of MAC’s collaborative efforts can be found everywhere from the lobby walls of Centre Stage, where individual artists display their work to coincide with theatrical productions, to galleries at the Chamber of Commerce, to a new program that will place fine art on recycling bins.

“Imagine a day,” muses Janette Wesley, a Greenville artist and the project’s developer, “when a visitor puts a can in a recycling bin and discovers a beautiful landscape.” But MAC doesn’t only focus on established artists and organizations. The SmartArts program allows teaching artists in the Greenville County school system to integrate arts into the curriculum at all grade levels. Imagine math and poetry; science and drumming; history and sculpting. Though Ethridge says that federal funds for SmartArts expired in 2007, MAC was able to raise more than $200,000 to continue its work.

Teaching artist and writer Heather Magruder has experienced the transformative effect of this program first hand. “In seventh-grade geometry we were building sculpture poems, in which students can use language and math to express something significant,” Magruder recalls. “That combination made them think more deeply, not just abuot poetry and math, but where they are going with their lives.”