North Adams Open Studios Gets a Gold Star for Effort

By Tammy Daniels
iBerkshires Staff
12:40AM / Friday, September 18, 2009

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Rep. Daniel E. Bosley presents a Gold Star award to former and current Open Studios Chairmen Sharon Carson and Phillip Sellers. MCC representative Jenifer Lawless is at right.

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — It started out with six artists getting together to show the community what they were up to in a refashioned mill; it's grown to encompass artists and galleries across the city and is creeping out to surrounding communities as well.

As a measure of its success in bringing community and culture together, the all-volunteer North Adams Open Studios was awarded a Gold Star by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. It was nominated by the local council, the Cultural Council of Northern Berkshire.

The framed certificate was presented to the most recent chairmen of the annual event on Wednesday evening by MCC representative Jenifer Lawless and state Rep. Daniel E. Bosley, who noted that the state's 329 local cultural councils submit thousands of requests for arts funding each year.

"Of the 5,000 that were funded, seven were given Gold Stars," he told the more than 50 local artists and community leaders gathered in the Eclipse Mill Gallery. "You are one of the elite in the state."

Open Studios is held one weekend each October, bringing upwards of 2,000 people to galleries and dozens of studios throughout the city. This year it takes place Oct. 17 and 18.

'Is this a podium or a piece of art?' joked Bosley. 'No, really. Is it?"

"Open Studios began in 2004 with just six studios and we got a 100 people," said Sharon Carson, chairman of the 2007 event. "It was our introduction to our neighborhood, though honestly most were former mill workers and were very curious about the building more so than our artwork."

In 2007, the organizers applied for a grant to Cultural Council of Northern Berkshire to promote the event, resulting in a 100 percent increase in traffic, said Carson.

But that first informal effort would not only lay the groundwork for the popular event, it would also create an atmosphere of inclusiveness between the arriving artists and the residents who had once labored in the mills now filling with galleries.

"Arts has changed this community," said Mayor John Barrett III. "And changed the way this community thinks about art ... Who would have thought that 10 years after Mass MoCA opened, we'd have 100 artists participating?"

Members of the Cultural Council of Northern Berkshire remind artists that a $1,000 grant is still available.

Carson and 2009 Chairman Phillip Sellers credited support from the city through the use of the North Adams Trolley, the Cultural Council and Bosley's advocacy in Boston and the many volunteers for making the event a success.

Bosley said he hears from many people how the state shouldn't be funding the arts during this tough times. But that's wrong, he said. "It not only creates an economic activity ... it can expand and grow because it's really part of our community, part of what we do part of who we are. ... It's so heartening to see that."

Barrett agreed: "This is economic development. It's economic development at it's best."