This is the second in a nine-part series spotlighting the Chatham County Arts Council’s Grassroots Grant recipients for 2014. The Grassroots Grant Program allows the Chatham County Arts Council to work with our own community members to determine where artists and arts funding can make the greatest impact locally.
Guess what your arts council has been up to: We’re mixing sustainable environmental practices with sculpture art through our Grassroots Grant Program! Central Carolina Community College (CCCC), a Grassroots Grant recipient this year, will use its grant dollars to pay local artists to provide workshops on the connections between environmental sculpture and questions of sustainability.
CCCC is connecting the Fine Arts Program and Sustainable Technologies to complete the first phase of a permanent environmental sculpture park on its Pittsboro campus. What the heck is an environmental sculpture park, you say? It’s a sculpture park with socially engaged, time-based artwork that involves communities in monitoring their landscapes and taking a participatory role in sustainable practices.
This project is extra cool because of the way it connects students and community members with local artists. Over 30 community members, students, and local artists attended the January workshop to review topographic maps of the campus, learn about the environmental sculpture process, and identify possible site locations for the first sculpture. According to founding members of the project, student participation has been essential in designing models that represent a sustainable technology focus.
CCCC is currently reviewing the 3 or 4 designs developed at February’s charrette. Next, the artistic process of creating the first sustainable sculpture begins! Look for the first sculpture’s appearance by the end of this summer—the inaugural creation in the emergence of a permanent sustainable sculpture park on the Pittsboro CCCC Campus.
Check out the CCCC website to learn more about this fabulously creative work in Chatham County.
The Grassroots Arts Program is offered by Chatham County Arts Council through the generous assistance of the North Carolina Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of North Carolina and the National Endowment of the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.
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