The Sebastopol Center for the Arts, an esteemed brick-and-mortar venue and resource hub for local artists is thinking creatively to maintain programming and services like countless other organizations now that the pandemic has closed doors far and wide.
Una Glass, managing director and chief financial officer of the arts center, said while the doors remain closed, the center is not at risk of shuttering its windows for good. Glass is also the newly-appointed mayor of Sebastopol.
The Sebastopol Center for the Arts is also seeking to expand its online offerings like art history lectures, virtual museum tours and events, charging small amounts for registration and accepting grants and donations to fund its operations.
“We’re not in dire circumstances, we’re actually doing better this year than we did last year, despite the pandemic. But we’re doing that by keeping our costs down,” Glass said, although uploading its existence and exhibits to “a virtual universe” impacts funding.
Glass said, “We’ve had to pull together the infrastructure to make that happen, but it’s been quite successful. However, the level of revenue we used to have from being a big venue where there would be big events — we can’t do that right now. So, we need to continue to ask for support to make sure we’re there when we get around the bend and after the COVID crisis.”
According to Glass and Creative Director Catherine Devriese, the Sebastopol Center for the Arts gave artists who carve a living out of their crafts a place to gain exposure and take enrichment classes.
Since the shutdown, the center had to replace open studio programs “Art at the Source” in spring and “Art Trails” in the fall, with an online version when traditionally hundreds of independent artists overall would open their studios to the public for tens of thousands of art enthusiasts traveling to Sonoma County to meet, behold and buy, Glass said.
A virtual live auction to keep supervised distance learning program going
As the Sebastopol Center for the Arts adapts to online events and opportunities, the center also seeks to continue its response to the need from local families for a safe environment for children to do their online schooling.
The center began its six-week pilot supervised distance learning program in November and intends to continue providing youth adult supervision and support and afternoon arts enrichment classes in January and February, Glass said.
According to Devriese, the program does not bring funding to the Sebastopol Center for the Arts other than to cover its own operations, and the vast majority of children attend using sponsorships.
The center has received substantial donations in addition to revenue from its partnership with the Sebastopol Union School District, but the center will host a live paddle-raise auction titled “Give. Believe. Inspire.” Dec. 6 from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. to raise funds for the distance learning program and ongoing art programming. A silent auction that began in November will end Dec. 10, Devriese said.
The creative director said the auction not only features the artwork of West County creators, but experiences such as a Mexican Riviera vacation and a French countryside farmhouse getaway for when international travel resumes.
Information and registration for the silent and live auctions can be found at the center’s website here.
Glass said about 65% of the proceeds will go to the distance learning program to pay its teachers, assistants and arts instructors.
“And it turns out that it costs a lot of money to heat that building in the winter,” she said, while the rest will go to the center’s online programs and lectures.
“All of that takes infrastructure, people that are running our websites, our information technology in order to enable us to do all this online work,” Glass said.
As the Sebastopol Center for the Arts seeks to meet a community need for child supervision in education, the center has also aided artists who lost homes and studios to this year’s wildfires, such as M.C. Carolyn, whose painting “Colors… A Woman in Blue” features prominently in the center’s auctions. The center’s online auction catalog lists bidding to end Dec. 10 at midnight.
Easing the way for artists impacted by wildfires
M.C. Carolyn’s home and studio in Healdsburg burned to the ground during the Walbridge Fire. She said her sculptures were lost to the disaster, but the paintings she stored elsewhere survived.
“I had to realize that everything is a memory now, so I’m building a whole new life and a new way of looking at things besides having to figure out how to rebuild using insurance money and support from my friends,” she said. “And Sebastopol Center for the Arts has been wonderful to help support me, and even offered me materials so I can start creating again.”
M.C. Carolyn lives in a motel with her husband, a dog and a cat for the time being, creating her artwork in her mind. She said she received a call asking if the center could use “Color… A Woman in Blue” as the cover image for the auction and agreed. M.C. Carolyn said those who selected her artwork agreed it expressed the sentiment of the time, “because it’s ambiguous.”
Her website’s description of the work reads, “It is up to the viewer to decide if she is offering sanctuary for our troubled world to the figures represented behind her or is she creating a wall of blue against our troubled world to keep safe the small figure pressing against her side inside the blue wrap and herself.”
M.C. Carolyn said she donated the painting to the auction in appreciation for the center’s assistance over the years. She said the center provided online support and seminars to offer artists as much exposure as possible in this new era.
Glass said the center waived fees for artists scathed by the fires to display their artwork for sale on its virtual platform, Sebastopol Arts Virtual Open Studios (SAVOS), which replaced 2020’s Art at the Source and Art Trails events made impossible in person due to the fires and the pandemic. Now, the impacted artists receive 100% of the revenue from the artwork they sell through SAVOS.
