Sunday, September 12, 1999
Fitton becoming model center for community arts
Always looking for something else to do
BY JACKIE DEMALINE
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Let's think about a model community arts center. Of course it would have galleries, a performance space, and a variety of classes for children and adults. There would be well-equipped and well-lit art studios and classrooms in which to hold them.
Programming would stress the community and the arts. It would fit community needs.
There would be an award-winning education program partnering with local schools and an outreach program for children, teens and adults who don't or can't come to the center. The center comes to them.
And every year the center would honor the people of the community who demonstrated outstanding commitment and dedication to the arts.
This little community arts engine that could actually exists. It's the Fitton Center for Creative Arts in Hamilton.
A lot of people credit the Fitton's executive director, Rick Jones, for the its success. The Fitton is acquiring a national reputation, and it's not unusual for center staff to field “tell us how you do it ...” phone calls from California, Florida, Massachusetts in any given week.
The one person who doesn't give Mr. Jones credit is Mr. Jones. It's the staff, he says, the board, Hamilton's city government. “It's the spirit of the people involved,” he says, “their desire to see the community improve and move forward.”
And it's the average citizen, he says, “It's everyday people saying more and more "there's something to the arts.”'
Busy fall ahead
Starting with the third annual Ambassador Awards announced earlier this week, the Fitton is looking at a busy fall.
At the Ambassador Awards, hats were tipped to:
• Arts educator Sue Samoviski, a 21-year teaching veteran who brought the national Very Special Arts program (for handicapped students) to Hamilton High School;
• The Butler County Association for Retarded Citizens, which developed an art contest, a drama club and a chorale;
• Arts patron Dr. Ed Kezur, who, among many other contributions, provided the Teldex hearing impaired system in the Fitton's theater;
• Arts volunteer Clare Easton who has given unstinting support of Middfest International since 1981;
• Champion International was honored for its longtime sponsorship of juried art competition Feed the Body, Feed the Soul;
• Individual artist Phil Joseph of Oxford, retired Miami University art professor, longtime (more than 20 years) exhibition curator for the annual Greater Hamilton Art Exhibit and an exhibiting artist;
• Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park was recognized as outstanding arts organization;
• Fairfield High School violinist Rachel Allen was named outstanding young artist.
This year there were two Arts Circle Awards presented, recognizing consistent, long-term service. Awardees were Hamilton Civic Theater and Rita Line, “the glue that has held the Hamilton-Fairfield Symphony Orchestra and Hamilton Municipal Band together for several decades.” This is her 47th season with the symphony and next year will be her 50th with the band.
Getting closer
The Fitton Center has been getting more and more calls from Cincinnatians asking for directions, schedules and brochures.
Some of what's going on and coming up:
The Riverbank Poetry Project monthly open mike readings resume at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
The best news is that this year it adds the John P. Kurlas Poet-in-Residence Series. Three nationally recognized poets will do workshops, school visits and public readings: Nov. 9, Dana Wildsmith of Yemassee, S.C., will read from her new Our Bodies Remembered; Jan. 11, Cincinnati's own Richard Hague (a National Book Award nominee for Milltown Natural) will read; Feb. 8, George Ella Lyon (details TBA).
Augmenting the popular poetry open mike with the poet-in-residence series, notes Mr. Jones, “is about our philosophy of never being satisfied with the status quo. We want to keep people challenged and thinking about the arts in a lot of different ways.”
So there's the monthly Music Cafe that invites musicians of all abilities and ages to hear and present live performances. You can be a star.
Opening today in the Fitton gallery are the work of painter Ronald O. Davey and Loveland porcelain and raku artist Adriana DePalma. There's an opening reception from 3 to 5 p.m.
Later this fall, master quilter Carolyn Mazloomi and Dennis Harrington, director of the Aronoff Center's Weston Gallery will be jurors for the sixth annual Feed the Body, Feed the Soul exhibit. The show opens Oct. 24.
Deadline for entries is Oct. 9. First place wins $2,500. The competition benefits Shared Harvest Food Bank and the Fitton Center.
Schools outreach
The Fitton's national arts-in-curriculum SPECTRA+ program started in two Hamilton and Fairfield elementary schools. It's been adopted by several other sites across the U.S., and this year the program will expand to Middletown City Schools.
It's one of only three curriculum-based arts education programs to receive the top level of funding — $100,000— from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) this year. The others were Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the State University of New York at Albany Research Foundation.
The NEA grant will support a new SPECTRA+ research project focusing on several elementary schools with at-risk students. The Fitton will raise $150,000 in matching funds.
Remember ArtWorks, the summer arts apprentice program based in Eden Park? The Fitton's Teenworks goes year-round, a daily two-hour after-school session that puts apprentices with artists. It's fashioned after New Orleans' award-winning YAYA.
Teenworks is part of the Fitton's outreach program Arts in Common, which takes art classes to the Butler County community.
“We started with an eye on the big picture,” Mr. Jones says about Arts in Common, “creating a program to make some kind of difference for people who don't have the advantage of experiencing the arts.”
The latest Arts in Common program is in Butler County's Juvenile Detention Center. An initial program from winter 1999 has grown and by summer an artist was going to the detention center every week day with art classes provided to all inmates.
More and more stuff
The Fitton's fall art classes begin Monday and continue through Oct. 23.
The six-part EntertainmentPLUS! series begins Nov. 6 with Margaret Baker in her one-woman show Infinity Babies; the noontime KeyBank Celebrating Self speaker series opens Sept. 22 with Rob Kret, director of the Miami University Art Museum talking about “Making the Most of Your Next Visit to a Museum.”
The Fitton's fourth annual fund-raiser Wine & All That Jazz is set for Oct. 2. The tasting — the topic of which will be selecting sparkling wine and champagne, the better to prepare for your millennium celebration — begins at 7 p.m. led by Jack Keegan.
The Fitton has opened its doors to the Hamilton-Fairfield Symphony Orchestra Chorale. The adult group meets Monday evenings. To arrange an audition or for more information call conductor Paul Stanbery at 474-1584.
Call the Fitton Center at 863-8873 for information on all of the above.
What's next?
What's next for the Fitton? “I'm involved in other things in the community,” Mr. Jones notes, “and that always leads to something.”
He's part of a committee working on plans for the mile-long corridor that leads from Ohio 4 to Hamilton's new Government Services Center. “I try to bring arts into the thinking,” he says, crediting the mayor and county commissioners for taking an interest. Watch for public art and signage along the route.
Watch, too, for Reflection & Renewal: A Perspective on Public Art in the new year. The plan is to start with lectures in January, and a symposium in April, as well as the publication of a driving/walking tour guide. The project is sponsored by several regional arts and tourism groups.
These days Mr. Jones is eagerly awaiting the final report (due by November) of the region's 2020 study. He already knows that arts were mentioned in all six focus groups. No doubt it will, as usual for Mr. Jones and the Fitton Center, lead to something.
Jackie Demaline is the Enquirer's theater critic and roving arts reporter. Write her at Cincinnati Enquirer, 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202. Fax: 768-8330.
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