West Columbus SPARC Grant

We were absolutely thrilled to learn that WCHS had been awarded the prestigious SPARC (School and Public Art Residency and Collaboration) grant. The total amount of the grant is 25,000 dollars, but what it will mean is so much more valuable to all of Columbus County.

We have just completed the second of many steps, and I wanted to review them and let everyone know what is coming next.

1) Step number one was a meeting with Linda Bamford and Jeffrey York of the North Carolina Arts Council. They visited West Columbus and met with the SPARC steering committee made of Superintendent Dr. Strickland, Tommy Nance, Principal Mark Brown, Visual Arts teacher Larry Hewett, English teacher ReGena Brown, Southeastern Community College professor Ron Cole, Columbus County Arts Council and others including students and parents.

This first meeting was a thorough explanation of the process. We also signed up for subcommittees, which will be crucial to the success of this project.

At the close of this meeting, we began to put together the artist selection committee. It was made up of myself (arts coordinator) Larry Hewett, Ron Cole, Sally Mann, Cheyenne Peacock (advanced art student) Tommy Nance (director of facilities), and two teachers, Michael Powell and Carlton Campbell. I was personally very excited about having these two gentleman on board because they had been teaching at WCHS longer than anyone else, almost 60 years between them!

Ten artists had answered the Request for Qualifications sent out by the NCAC. We had reviewed resumes (but not artwork) of each of these. It was a very difficult choice that took many hours of discussion. What really rang true for me during this process is how the folks who were art "outsiders" contributed just as much to the conversation as the "artists" among the committee.

After much back and forth, we finally decided upon the three artists:
Brad Spencer, VirginiaWright-Frierson and Hanna Jubran/Jodi Hollnagel-Jubran

In my opinion. these are all world-class artists and Iam very excited about the next steps.

3) The three artists will visit West Columbus and talk to several "focus" groups, which will arm them with the knowledge they need to start developing some concepts for west columbus.

We'll keep you posted on this next step.

My initial impressions up to this point:
I am SO glad everyon has had an open mind. A closed mind could have easily made this a difficult project. I feared that there may be a bias towards an indoor piece of work-- but everyone has been equally open to all possibilities.