Neighborhood Report, 2011
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Witherspoon-Jackson Neighborhood Report April 2011 Introduction We are pleased to present this report on the Arts Council of Princeton’s activities related to the Witherspoon-Jackson (W-J) Neighborhood. This report covers the year since the presentation of our last Neighborhood Report in April 2010. During the past year we have seen an increase in programming and, as reported in our 2009-10 Annual Report we had a very successful year all around. As a strong indicator of that success, we have once again been awarded a Citation of Excellence by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and we have been designated a Major Arts Organization for the state. As reported last year, during the first year after the public opening of the Paul Robeson Center in June 2008, the Arts Council ran a fiscal deficit and was forced to trim expenses significantly to manage operations through the economic downturn. During this past year, however, through careful expense management and aggressive fundraising, we ended the 2009-10 fiscal year in the black. This financial turnaround was crucial to our ability to increase programming, especially free programs provided to the Princeton community in the spirit of the Arts Council’s mission of building community through the arts. In addition, in an effort to provide financial stability for the future, the Arts Council has launched a “Burn the Mortgage” Campaign. Our goal is to raise $1.9 million in 2011 to completely retire our mortgage - the debt that we incurred because of delays and cost overruns on our building project. We are off to a good start and have raised over $550,000 since we began in January 2011. We are also working on continuing to build an endowment fund. As reported previously, the cornerstone contribution for our endowment was a $250,000 Legacy Grant awarded in late 2007 by the J. Seward Johnson Sr. 1963 Charitable Trust which produces income specifically for W-J Neighborhood programs. In early 2011 we received our second major endowment grant of $100,000 from the Charles Evans Foundation, specifically to fund scholarships. In spite of significant economic obstacles the ACP has managed to continue to provide consistently excellent and exciting programs that enhance and benefit the greater Princeton community. During the year we focused on increasing our capacity to serve local Princeton residents, particularly to members of the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood. Currently we have three neighborhood residents serving on our board of trustees: Gail Everett, Orlando Fuquen, and Jim Floyd, Jr. In addition we have re-formed our Neighborhood Advisory Committee with members Shirley Satterfield, Minnie Craig, Chip Fisher, and Carlos Martinez. Although this report is designed to primarily cover our activities as they relate to the W-J neighborhood, we also wish to report on a number of important achievements that positively impact the entire Princeton Community. SUMMARY OF ACTIVITIES Community Partnerships - Programs for Teens During the past year the Arts Council, in partnership with the Princeton Public Library, HiTops, Corner House, and the Recreation Department formed “What’s Up Princeton,” a collective effort to increase programs for teens. Most recently the Arts Council hosted a teen open mic night in which numerous high school students shared their talents by performing. The goal is to sponsor quarterly teen events hosted by the Arts Council, the Library and the Recreation Department. Other partnerships continue with the Princeton Regional Schools, the Senior Resource Center, the Historical Society, KidsBridge, PYA, HomeFront and many others. Programs for Seniors The Arts Council received a Church and Dwight Employee Giving Fund grant to establish a pilot program, Art for Caregivers, designed to assist family members and professional caregivers with creative projects specifically for seniors. With a grant from the NJ State Arts Council we also began a program for seniors in partnership with Buckingham Place and Stonebridge Senior residences. Some of these programs were highlighted at the recent Alliance for Arts in Healthcare conference at Grounds for Sculpture. In Honor Of – Dahlia Elsayed In late 2010 our Artist in Residence was Dahlia Elsayed. During her residency she worked with local high school students to interview older members of the W-J neighborhood and beyond. The stories that came from this project were located by geography on a large map in the Robeson Center that identified where memories took place. A public sculpture installation related to the map and memories was on view outside the Robeson Center from September through December 2010. Black History Month During February 2011, for Black History Month, the Arts Council presented the following programs: Gospel Concert – Minister William Carter and the Princeton University Gospel Ensemble performed in the theater in the Arts Council’s Paul Robeson Center. Exhibition – The ACP co-sponsored an exhibition featuring works by Mike Gyampo and Benjamin Colbert at Numina Gallery at Princeton High School. Digital scanning project – During the month, and ongoing, we presented Saving Our History: African Americans in Princeton. In this project, Princeton native Yvonne Wooten Hill, now a visiting scholar from the Cultural Heritage Center in Florida, invited residents to bring historic family photos/documents to the Robeson Center to be scanned and preserved to an electronic format. ArtReach During the past year we continued our ArtReach programs, providing free in-school and after- school arts education programming to students at the Princeton Nursery School (funded by PNC Foundation) and partnering with Princeton Young Achievers (funded by Tyco, Horizon Foundation, NJ and Janssen) to provide art programs for students at PYA learning centers and at the Paul Robeson Center. At the Princeton Nursery School our artist Libby Ramage worked with 40 – 50 students two days per week. Since the fall we have continued our Creative Fridays program with PYA. The Arts Council is committed to continuing to provide free programs for neighborhood students, but it has been a struggle to keep the program funded, especially with the recent loss of funding from the Princeton Area Community Foundation. The total number of students served by our partnership with PYA weekly during the past year ranged from 100 - 120 students, with over half from the W-J Neighborhood participating at the Pannell Center and the Paul Robeson Center. At the end of the school year we held a very well-attended art exhibit at the Princeton Regional School’s Valley Road building to celebrate the children’s accomplishments. We also continued to offer programs for PYA youth beyond traditional visual arts. We provided music workshops, supported by a Wachovia Wells Fargo grant. During the summer we provided scholarships for W-J Neighborhood children so they could attend summer art and drama camp, which we held offsite at the Princeton Junior School. The campers’ art work was featured in an end of the summer exhibition at the Robeson Center. Witherspoon Middle School Tours In September, for the third year, in partnership with the Princeton Public Library and John Witherspoon Middle School, we provided tours of the Paul Robeson Center for over two hundred students from John Witherspoon Middle School. This tour program is now a regular activity designed to introduce students to the facilities and programs offered by both the Arts Council and the Library. Solar Tree Project Also, in partnership with JW, we placed sculptor Rein Triefeldt in residency in the middle school. He is working with an afterschool group made up of members of the art, science and environmental clubs who are learning about art, science, engineering and solar energy while working on art projects with the artist. “Kids at Work: Discovery through Art” During the school year, over 200 local elementary students came with their teachers for gallery tours and art-making sessions in our program “Kids at Work: Discovery through Art”. In these workshops school classes visited our gallery exhibitions, learned about the significance of the artwork, and engaged in hands-on art activities to make work based on what they saw in the gallery. Kids at Work is funded through a grant from the Gartenberg Family Fund. Community Portrait Project During 2010 - 2011 the Arts Council of Princeton is examining the many ways in which we see ourselves and one another through a series of projects coordinated under the banner Community Portrait Project. We encourage artists and instructors to participate in Community Portrait through projects that allow for creative expression around issues of identity and cross- cultural appreciation and understanding. Some projects are as simple as having students draw self-portraits and some more complex as in organizing a group mural project. The current exhibition “Between You and Me: an exhibition of photographic portraiture is part of this Community Portrait effort. Scholarships: The Arts Council was able to increase the scholarship fund during the past year with scholarships funded through our George Dale and Waxwood Scholarship Funds and by a grant from the Shepherd Foundation. A total of $17,292 was disbursed during the year and our analysis indicates that 39% of our students received art classes for free or reduced tuition. $2,252 was used for eighteen W-J neighborhood student registrations. As reported previously, we just recently received a $100,000 grant from the Charles Evans Foundation to establish a new scholarship endowment fund. Free Events for the Neighborhood and community: During this past year the Arts Council produced numerous events, and many of them were well attended by neighborhood residents. We attribute much of the success in attendance to these events to placing announcements in local church bulletins, actively participating in local groups such as the Youth Concerns Committee, the Black History Month Planning Committee, the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and by producing some of our flyers in Spanish as well as English.