Youth ARTS Alive is inviting all visual and performing artists, arts organizations, teachers and students to a visual and performing artists celebration in February.
There will be Mexican food, music and dancing, and an opportunity for performing and visual artists to meet. Youth ARTS Alive hires teaching artists for its free summer classes in dance, music, theater and visual arts and mentors artists who want to learn to teach while paying them as interns.
“We thought if we had a big party and invited all the visual artists and all the performing artists we would be able to find people who are looking for work,” said Gale McNeeley, founder of Youth ARTS Alive. “Say, for instance, whether a teacher wanted to work in painting or sculpting, or something to help support the careers of artists, but they don’t know how to get into that.”
The gathering takes place Feb. 11 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Santa Maria Valley Discovery Museum, located at 705 S. McClelland St. To Register for the event or for further information visit the program’s website at www.youthartsalive.org or call (805) 930-9029.
The event is catered for artists of all backgrounds, but McNeeley says at times it’s been difficult for the organization to reach community members that are of a Spanish- and Mixtec-speaking background, but he would like to remind artists the event will have translators on site and there are opportunities for everyone.
“We want to encourage people from the Mexican-American community, Mixteco and all Hispanic communities to come to this event because it’s not just in English, everyone will be understood,” said McNeeley.
Youth ARTS Alive provides arts education at city parks, for the United Way in Guadalupe and as summer enrichment at Santa Maria city schools.
“We’ve been around for seven years now and last summer we educated 300 children and we needed 15 teachers for dance, music, theater, visual arts, and so the need is great,” said McNeeley.
The newest addition for the program is going to be at the NewLove Community Building, where Youth ARTS Alive aims to hold classes and opportunities for Santa Maria’s more Indigenous-Mexican community members. According to McNeeley, the Newlove area in Santa Maria is predominantly a Mixteco neighborhood.
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“The Mixtec families really deserve free art classes. So this event is an outreach that we’re making throughout the city to uncover artists. There are probably Mixteco artists that can teach painting or guitar or dance, but we just don’t know them,” said McNeeley
McNeeley says it can be difficult for artists to find friends or work in the art community because most of it is independent work.
“A lot of the time visual artists, because they work alone, don’t get to meet other visual artists unless they’re in classes with them,” said McNeeley. “This is also an opportunity for artists to meet fellow artists with similar talents and maybe they can work to create something together”.
McNeeley says if artists work together, they will create more and will earn more because the need for art is greater than we know.
“We need to leave our homes and get out into the community to find out what the need is for our art, and working with children no matter what art style you may do whether you were a dancer, a painter, an actor working with children is an inspiration because they look at the world innocently and we need to do that too,” McNeeley said.
McNeeley added that the purpose of the event is to celebrate performing and visual arts, but also to bring artists together, so that Youth Arts Alive can make something happen for them in the city.
“We hope this is only the beginning of continual events for artists where people find out if there are grants to do these murals, who is hiring. We want to be a connector for hiring artists and a helper,” said McNeeley.
If you are a visual or performing artist, come share in the creation of more work for Artists in the Santa Maria Valley and attend this Visual and Performing Artists Celebration.