This week I am saying farewell to the Arts Center–in a few short days I will be taking up my post as the Communications Fellow at Centre College, where I will be writing lots of web stories and doing lots of Tweeting. It is certainly a bittersweet goodbye, and I will very much miss being a part of all the exciting things happening at the Arts Center. The blog-writing torch will soon be passed to our new Marketing Director, so as my final blog post here at the Arts Center, I’ll take a look back at the top three all-time favorite things I did while I was here.
Pressing the Big Red Button
A few short weeks after I got hired, I helped launch the Arts Center’s new and improved website. When I reminisce about the launching of the website, I like to imagine myself hunkered in a control room, dramatically flipping back a plastic cover and slamming my fist on a giant red button. While the official launch of the website was much less exciting than that, I still got quite a thrill from seeing such a large back-burner project come to life. Our new website is (in my quite biased opinion) sleek, sophisticated, and hugely useful for people who want to know what’s going on at the Arts Center. While I put in a huge amount of work coordinating with our web designer and multiple other staff members, it was all worth it when I got to be a part of our new website’s birth. The huge sense of accomplishment and the knowledge that I was helping take the Arts Center to the next level are memories I will cherish for a long time to come.
Putting on My Dancing Shoes
While ballroom dance classes are nothing new to the Arts Center, they were to me when I first arrived. I took a few classes and soon I was hooked. Before I knew it, I was working with our instructor to plan a monthly ballroom dance designed to draw newbies like myself in while giving our regulars another opportunity to practice their moves. Like anything worth doing, this project required a lot of labor–mostly weekend hours that I gave to work the events. But the effort paid off with a community event that is slowly growing and filling a need for more local dancing opportunities. Making a positive impact on the quality of downtown Danville was something I definitely will not forget (this picture of me at one of our dances captures my excitement pretty well, I think!).
Slapping on a New Coat of Paint
I’ve been lucky enough to work on public art in Danville twice: once during the Vice Presidential Debate and once in the month leading up to the Great American Brass Band Festival. Both of these events threw our small Kentucky town into the national spotlight, and the colorful and energetic murals I helped paint definitely put Danville’s best foot (well, windows) forward. The subject of blogs past, my VP debate mural experience was memorable because of how quickly it transformed Main Street and how energetically our community responded to it. The Brass Band mural was memorable for a different reason. The complexity of the Brass Band mural required extensive tracing sessions, which, because we used a projector to create the images, had to be done in the darkness of night. Though tracing until midnight had its downsides, the excitement of completing the first steps and painting in the basic lines that hinted at what would be coming were well worth the bags under my eyes. Both of these projects were ones that resulted in some of the most overt, enthusiastic, and positive community response I saw during my time at the Arts Center. Being connected to such a vibrant and popular community fixture was definitely unforgettable.
Wow–what a time I’ve had at the Arts Center! Thanks to everyone who helped make it such a great experience for me. It is with a special fondness that I will cherish my time and experiences at the Community Arts Center. I can’t wait to see what else is in store for this place!
