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Send payment through mail or in person to YSAC (address below)

OR pay by check. Mailed to YSAC at:
P.O. Box 459
Yellow Springs, OH 45387

Or drop off payment at YSAC, 111 Corry Street
Wednesday-Sundays, 1-4pm.

Event: Saturday, June 22 (7-10pm)
Location: YS Arts Council Gallery, 111 Corry Street, Yellow Springs, Ohio

Arts Alive is a fundraiser put on by the Yellow Springs Arts Council. The event will support YSAC’s new performance series, Arts Alive, along with youth art programs. Featured musicians include headliners Will C and fam!ly, along with The Show, playing in the YSAC outdoor courtyard. The June exhibit, Who am I? Sculpture by Alice Robrish, will be on display in the gallery. Rounding out the evening will be kids art, an YS Brewery beer garden and a table raffle of items from local shops and music venues. The raffle will not only raise funds, it will promote local bands and musicians who donate merchandise for the cause.

The Arts Council is a strong supporter of local music. In 2012, the YSAC moved to a multi-arts venue at 111 Corry Street, which includes a 750 square foot performance and workshop space, as well as an outdoor courtyard. Over the past year the organization has been exploring formats for music events and performance opportunities. This spring a new stage was constructed for the courtyard. “We have a great location in the heart of downtown Yellow Springs where we can bring in musicians, promote them, and share their talents with the public. It’s a perfect role for the Arts Council”, says YSAC Arts and Cultural Manger, Deb Housh.

The new monthly Arts Council performance series, Arts Alive, hosts music groups and other performers on second Saturdays. For a $5 suggested donation, visitors can explore the current gallery show, hear an art talk by an exhibiting artist, then enjoy the music of a favorite local band. People can come for just the art, just the music, or both. Arts Alive has it all, and it runs during the early evening, a time conducive to families and adults who aren’t into late-nighters.

Proceeds from ths Fundraiser will benefit the Arts Alive season, as well as youth art programs. The event will highlight collaborative paintings created through YSAC’s summer art program “Mural Camp”. These youth art classes are for ages 7-14 and are taught by local artist Nancy Epling, who has worked with the Chicago Public Art Group and recently returned from a mural painting experience in Ireland. The kids take walking tours of Yellow Springs’ extensive “outdoor museum” of public art, then create their own murals. Hands on kids art activities will also be offered during the Arts Alive fundraising evening. Funds from the event will contribute to youth art programs and scholarships throughout the year.

The Arts Alive Fundraiser on June 22 has a $5+ suggested donation (kids 12 and under free) and other ways to donate throughout the evening. Come out to YSAC for Music Alive on June 22, from 7-10pm, in support of local music and youth art. The arts are alive in Yellow Springs!

Press Contact: Lara Bauer
flyingbuffalo2@gmail.com, 937-679-9722

The JafaGirls were formed in 2005, but a love of arts and crafts has been a lifetime passion for artists Nancy Mellon and Corrine Bayraktaroglu. It was at a Yellow Springs Arts Council meeting in 2005 that they discovered a mutual joy for creating art mischief together, along with a desire to spread the word about local arts, artists and community. They find yarn bombing to be a strangely powerful and fun way to recontextualize traditionally held notions of knitting/crochet and street art. It elicits a range of emotions, ideas and questions. The act of putting the art up in public is an important part of yarn bombing for the JafaGirls. It gives the community an opportunity to interact, to see how it happens, ask questions, share opinions and join in.

The JafaGirl’s first big ventures were with the Yellow Springs Arts Council. In 2007 they put together an interactive community show called “Is It Art?” The same year came the Chamberpot Gallery in the local public restroom. There they curated a yearly community show that included twenty-four local artists over the gallery’s three and a half years. In 2008 they staged a community “Graffiti Show” and out of that grew the “Knit Knot Tree”.

Both the Chamber Pot Gallery and the Knit Knot Tree garnered international publicity for the art duo and for Yellow Springs. “We were tickled pink and a bit surprised. It was an amazing roller coaster ride that still is going on. The Chamber Pot Gallery was just this year featured in an article in the Taiwan Airlines inflight magazine. Who’d’a thunk?”, said JafaGirl Nancy Mellon.

Other JafaGirl “arty adventures”:

• Yellow Springs Arts Blog (2006-present): Created by Corrine Bayraktaroglu to showcase community art.
• Dayton & Corry Streets downtown public “gallery” (2008-2012): Roughly 70 yarn bomb works by the JafaGirls have been installed there. Seven books have been published featuring different JafaGirl installations. In addition to Yellow Springs, they have also had Yarn Bombs installed in Columbus, OH, Ann Arbor MI, Hershey, PA, Taiwan and England.
• What If? Project (2009): Photographs and art mischief questioning boundaries and displaying the words “What if?”
• Free Art Fridays (2005-Ongoing): Works placed around downtown Yellow Springs are left in “finders-keepers” fashion for the public
• “The Kiss” project (2009 and again in 2012): A community performance art piece that included more than 85 couples.
• Skeleton Postcard series (2010): Photographs by Corrine Bayraktarolgu that depicted a full sized articulated wooden skeleton in various places around Yellow Springs.
• Bits and Bobs (2010): Radio chats about art with the JafaGirls on BlogTalk Radio.
• Mr. Plato (2010-11): A repurposed, felt mosaic-covered resuscitation doll who traveled around to different businesses in and out of town.
• “Flower Power” (2011-12): A community project that involved three months of weekly public meetings to make flowers. These were then installed as public works of art on flower poles, railings and more.
• Traveling Gum Wall (2011): A fundraising project sponsored by the Yellow Springs Arts Council, which involved people purchasing a piece of gum, chewing, then sticking it onto a collaborative mural.
• Peeps in the Park (2012): Installation of twelve art pieces on a public wall at the 100 Corry Street Art Park.

“The theme of using craft towards community building is a thread that weaves through JafaGirl works. They use processes and forms of art often considered too ladylike, too old fashioned or irrelevant for “high” art, and they blow those preconceived notions out of the water. Nancy and Corrine craft for a purpose—to bring community together, to encourage a questioning of one’s surroundings, to make people smile, and sometimes to convey strong messages about politics and culture. They show that hard messages can sometimes be best conveyed through soft materials”, according to YSAC Arts & Cultural Manager, Deb Housh.

“Our modus operandi has been to try and drag others into our mischief, whether they were adult, child, a local policeman, artists or non-artists. Luckily in Yellow Springs it wasn’t hard to do”, says JafaGirl, Corrine Bayraktaroglu aka Jafabrit

Works and narratives about the JafaGirls are part of a newly released book entitled Craft Activism: People, Ideas, and Projects from the New Community of Handmade and How You Can Join In.

In 2005 the Yellow Springs Community Information Project began. Among other analyses, a list of community assets was complied: http://www.45387.org/cip/docs/j_community_assets.pdf

The full report can be found at:
http://www.45387.org/cip/planning_considerations_and_crit.html

Phyllis Schmidt

Becoming Involved in the Arts in Yellow Springs

In the 1970’s, many of the organizations in town were loosely formed and run by volunteers. For a long time the Yellow Springs Arts Council functioned that way. When Phyllis Schmidt had just moved to town, she remembered a friend saying, “If you want to be left alone in YS, just move into your house. But if you want to get involved with the community and you are interested in something, like blue speckled grackles, all you have to do is put a note in the paper inviting others to join you at 4 am at the bird blind in Glen Helen…and 14 people will show up.”

Phyllis wanted to do something with the arts in the village. She had graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a degree in fine art, but her love was interior design. She joined the Arts Council, which was then meeting on the second floor of the old Bryan High School. The building had just been designated as the “John Bryan Community Center” and was starting to be used for all sorts of art, theater and recreation classes. It looked like an old, abandoned high school, with dark hallways lined with miles of beat up lockers. Phyllis would walk along the hallways on her way to Arts Council meetings and think, “This building is grim, grim, grim.”

Phyllis asked the Village’s Parks and Recreation Department, which was located on the first floor of the Bryan building, if there was any way something could be done to help the building. She was a self-starter and doer, and while there was no personnel, paid time, or budget for such a project, Phyllis was able to negotiate an agreement. The director of Parks and Rec provided cans of paint in exchange for Phyllis’ artistic services.

Magic always begins with the words “what if?” and Phyllis had an idea to transform the John Bryan Community Center. Influenced by the bold graphic artwork of Robert Indiana, Phyllis wondered “What if we put floor to ceiling super graphics along the walls?” She imagined letters so big that it would take a whole hallway to spell out “John Bryan”. The designs would camouflage all the lockers and bring light into the dark hallways. For several hours each day, over a period of months, Phyllis made this idea into a reality.

Phyllis drew the humongous letters, one by one, using the vertical lines of the lockers for her guide. Day after day she would climb the ladder and paint—a Danish blue for the background and bright white for the letters. Light began flooding into the halls. The words “John Bryan”, large and bold, were proudly stretched from one end of the hallways to the other and even around the corner. The lockers disappeared into the blue of the trompe l’oeil.

Then one day, she was done…or was she? The upstairs halls looked pretty drab too, but by now her creative energy was fairly spent. She called upon her friends Phil and Frankie Roupp to spread the word that help was needed. One Saturday, twenty-four people showed up with brushes in hand. Phyllis drew the graphics and they painted, completing the second floor and bringing the new community center to life!

Phyllis says it was all very satisfying, but what she really loves is that all these people were motivated by a sense of service to the village and a willingness to give their time and talent for the common good. These were not people who necessarily used the art classes or recreation services of the John Bryan Center, even Phyllis never used the building other than as a big canvas. These volunteers all just wanted to make it a better place. And they had fun doing it!

Writer/Director Joanne Caputo 

Caputo began her independent filmmaking career with a children’s video, Ballerina, Ballerina! (1995), recommended by Sesame St. Magazine.  Her first documentary, On A Roll: Family, Disability and the American Dream, was broadcast nationally in 2005 by PBS (www.pbs.org/onaroll), where it won the Independent Lens Audience Award. Recommended by The New York Times, Anti-Defamation League and others, On A Roll continues to represent the USA at international disability film festivals around the globe. In 2008 Caputo self-published Margaret Garner, a dual non-fiction book based on an American Slavery research project for a screenplay. Caputo released her third film, Cutting Loose in 2010, a seven-year documentary study of an American prison artist.

Caputo is the former recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Artist Project Grant (On A Roll, 2002) and a Screenwriting Fellowship (Margaret Garner, 1998). A magna cum laude graduate from the University of Pittsburgh with a Pennsylvania Master’s Equivalency Certificate, she is married to author/illustrator Michael Fleishman and is the mother of their two sons, Cooper and Max.

The Yellow Springs Arts Council supports local arts infrastructure through program opportunities, publicity, education, fiscal sponsorship, advocacy, and coordinated partnerships across the community. Each year the YSAC supports over 200 local creative workers. The organization began in the 1950’s as the Yellow Springs Arts Association. In 1972, it incorporated as a 501(c)3 non-profit and adopted the full name, Yellow Springs Arts Council.

In 2008, the YSAC expanded its mission to encompass all arts disciplines and opened an administrative office in downtown Yellow Springs, followed by the launch of the YSAC Community Gallery and Multi-Arts Center. YSAC increased its arts advocacy role in 2012, which led to the Yellow Springs Village Council’s adoption of a Public Arts Policy in January 2013. Regional publicity for YSAC supported events, in partnership with the YS Chamber of Commerce, brings thousands of visitors to Yellow Springs annually for arts-related activities.

The Arts Council manages three signature programs. Our Gallery Program provides exhibition opportunities and facilitated services to local artists. The gallery also hosts music and other performance genres as part of our Arts Alive monthly series. Yellow Springs Experience is our partnership and marketing program, which provides publicity and networking opportunities for artists and cultural groups. It allows exciting community projects to come to fruition through Arts Council’s fiscal sponsorship and support. Our Education Program includes on-site arts classes and programs with local schools.

YSAC is a member organization and relies on membership dues and donations. The organization is also supported through grant writing and fundraising projects. Artists, appreciators, and supporters of all arts disciplines are welcome and encouraged to participate in the organization. Membership levels include Arts Supporters, Advantage Member Working Artists, and The Gift of Art Society for larger donors. Our programs are accessible to YSAC members, local citizens and visitors through free offerings and ticketed events.

The Yellow Springs Arts Council strives for wide cultural participation in our efforts to meet the needs of the community. The Yellow Springs Arts Council does not discriminate on the basis of age, ability, background, culture, national or ethnic origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation or economic circumstance. Through an inclusive practice, we aim to reflect our wider community and promote positive attitudes to both the similarities and differences in each other.

Uncorked Creativity
Thursdays, 3/21 & 3/28, 6:30-8:30 – $25
pre-registration required at
www.ysartscouncil.org/education/class-enrollment