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New organization to promote art, artists
Friday May 9 2008 By Eric Sparling Artists in the area are banding together under an umbrella organization with a four-pronged mandate to improve the stature and economic feasibility of the arts in Dufferin. Headwaters Arts is the offspring — perhaps marriage is a better word — of the Headwaters Arts Festival and the Headwaters Arts Network. The first is an annual event that promotes the arts and the area as a centre for arts, while the second has focussed on developing communication pipelines linking hundreds of artists. Now they’ve pooled their talents and enlisted the aid of broader connections to form Headwaters Arts, the goals of which — according to Monica Schut, an artist, founding member of the Headwaters Arts Network and vice-president of the new organization — are to improve communication in the arts community, develop collaborative marketing opportunities, provide professional development focussed on improving business savvy, and foster the next generation of artists.
“I’ve always been compelled to work with my hands,” says Schut. The mixed media sculptor supplements her income teaching part-time at the Canadian Institute of Floral Design. Like many artists, she would like to make her living from her art. Headwaters Arts may improve her chances, according to the group’s mandate. Not that Schut lacks business skills. She and her husband had five flower shops in the past, and she was instrumental in getting the Headwaters Arts Network off the ground, the mandate of which, she says, was to build relationships in the community and make people aware of opportunities. Artists often work in isolation, says Schut, and the network was a way to bring an element of collaboration into what is typically a solo endeavour.
Schut says, “we have a wealth of artists” congregating in the area — the natural environment is an inspiration for many of them, she claims — and the idea of working with the festival was a natural outgrowth of the same instinct that drove her to create the network in the first place. The festival was on the steering committee of the network and the general meeting of the former supported a merger with the latter. A small grant from the province’s Trillium Foundation was obtained and used to hire a consultant to survey area studios, out of which came the aforementioned goals. Concrete actions will take many forms, from developing a newsletter to working on joint advertising opportunities; from providing business seminars to performing outreach to school students and college craft programs (“It’s incumbent on us” to teach a love of the arts to young people, she says.).
A large gathering was held at the Opera House at the end of April. The veritable who’s-who of the Dufferin’s arts community was at the first professional development event, which featured a keynote speech by Cory Trepanier, a local painter who has achieved significant commercial success. Volunteers were enlisted in the reception room, and now the new organization is focussed on its first big event, Headwaters Arts Festival, as well as developing professional skills events, the website, and marketing literature. Government sources of funding are looking for action, says Schut. The net will be cast wide, she says, encompassing not just the visual arts, but theatre, cinema and music. She says this initial effort to flesh out Headwaters Arts is just “first steps…but it’s great to be a part of it.”

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