Accessible art
26 groups gain help with funds
As part of rehearsals, the crew used a sheet of metal, a drum, a tin can and a whistle to create the sound of a time machine whistling through the air into another era as part of a production of H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine.”
“It is a production that wouldn’t exist if not for a grant from ArtsMemphis,” says Bob Arnold, executive director of Chatterbox Audio Theater. He is staging four productions of the science fiction drama at Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired to give the feel of radio dramas from the 1930s and 1940s, like the riotinducing Wells classic “War of the Worlds” from 1938.
The $3,000 grant to fund the Clovernook project is one of 26 grants presented this week for educational and outreach projects by arts groups across Memphis. From the Tennessee Shakespeare Company to Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the 26 groups received $238,150, part of ArtsMemphis’ overall $3.3 million grants programfor 2012-13.
At ArtsMemphis, president and CEO Susan Schadt says the educational and outreach projects are part of a program that is intended to grow. ArtsMemphis launched the program using its own grant, $750,000 from the Assisi Foundation, to broaden arts education in the area over a three-year period.
“We are basing the first year on merit,” says Schadt, who will look for “community input and measurements,” including surveys, to determine which programs are funded during the next two years of the grant process.