I was in Parkersburg, WV on Sunday, November 23 for the opening reception of the West Virginia Art and Craft Guild Biennial Exhibit, where I had two prints in the exhibit. The Parkersburg Art Center is the first of three venues where the exhibit will be displayed between now and April, 2009. The Parkersburg Art Center was a sight to behold. They have refurbished a large building in downtown Parkersburg and turned it into a facility with a fabulous gallery, gift shop and a whole basement full of classrooms.
I was given a tour of the place by Abby Hayhurst, the Executive Director of the center. The gallery is made up of five or six spaces on two levels, depending on how they are utilized. They have a regular schedule of exhibits and Abby tells me that she likes to turn the exhibits over on a monthly basis.
One gallery was set up as a Holiday gift shop with a wide range of products from local artisans.
The lower level has been organized in to a complex of classrooms for children and adults, including a ceramics classroom complete with kiln, a "dirty classromom" where students can make whatever mess they must to be creative, and, with a donation of some computers, they have a computer lab where they can teach digital photography and graphics.
To find out more you can go to their extensive web site at http://www.parkersburgartcenter.org/
Building and running this beautiful facility is, I am sure, not without financial challenges. But it shows what can be done and should provide some measure of inspiration for us here in Martinsburg that such a goal is not impossible if we work together.
Obviously, this is not something we can accomplish in Martinsburg overnight but a point of discussion here is how do we build a community-wide critical mass that might generate the resources to make a start?
