Filed under: Arts & Culture | Tags: dac, dac dialogue, durango art, durango art center
Durango artist Jess Martin Leggett
About 20 artists, with “Give Art a Chance” posters, canvases and even a cute snake sculpture in hand, kicked off last night’s DAC Dialogue with a peaceful march from Buckley Park to the Durango Public Library.
More Durango Artists in the march to the DAC dialogue
Inside the meeting room, about 30 to 40 more artists and art supporters gathered around a table alongside Durango Art Center (DAC) board members. The conversation that followed was friendly, for the most part, and focused on coming up with ideas about where the Art Center should go and what it should do now that it’s left without an executive director or director of exhibitions and following the resignation of several DAC board members.
The not-so-friendly parts of the meeting came at a point when one Durango Artist told the board that they better do something and listen to them; otherwise “we’re going to walk.” According to several artists, there is a lot of frustration mostly due to lack of communication and openness between the DAC board and the arts community.
The end of the meeting left artists and DAC board members with a promise to meet up again, perhaps at a board meeting, which happens every first Tuesday of the month, or in a smaller, more focused meeting between the board and a selected group of representatives from local area artists. Among a long list of creative and interesting ideas and recommendations, from simply making sure both doors to the center are always open and unlocked to including a person under the age of 30 in DAC leadership, the board was also encouraged to be more open with their finances and perhaps consider hiring a new executive director and director of finance instead of hiring just one person to do both jobs.
Here is a recording of the DAC dialogue from beginning to end, it starts out with a speach by Heather Leavitt, the former DAC exhibtions director, who was one of the organizers of the art march and dialogue. Durango writer and arts supporter Stew Mosberg is the guy facilitating the discussion.
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[...] Durango these days, the Durango Arts Center is facing problems and undergoing all sorts of changes (KSUT has great coverage of this on their blog). One of the criticisms I’ve read about the DAC is their limited focus on certain types of [...]
Pingback by Bikes as Art: Single Speed World Championship’s Hand Made Bike Show | Beer N Bikes June 25, 2009 @ 4:17 pm[...] audio of the event. They continued on to the meeting and soon you can access the coverage online at http://www.ksut.org and http://www.durangoherald.com. For those in attendance of the meeting that signed the email list, you [...]
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