PAAC calendar highlights all art

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Courtesy Photo A photo of a Portsmouth Area Children’s Theatre performance that appears on one of the pages of the calendar.

By Joseph Pratt

[email protected]

The Portsmouth Area Arts Council (PAAC) has a rich history of fostering the arts of Scioto County, and they continue the trend today with many programs, including their most recent development of a community calendar of artistic events.

“We have an extremely vibrant and active arts community,” PAAC Executive Director Becky Lovins said. “At any given time, we have half a dozen organizations involved in productions or exhibitions, and they are trying to engage the community in their artistic offering. We each keep our own calender of events, but we share the same audience, so we figure this new format allows everyone to really enjoy the entire arts community by planning ahead.”

Lovins explained that she and Cirque d’Art Theatre Director Pegi Wilkes have been playing with the idea of a calendar of artistic events for a while, but spent a lot of time planning how to manifest it and debating if it would be online or a physical copy.

Lovins said that she decided to go with a physical calendar and include a plethora of high quality and visually appealing photos, coupled with color coordinated highlights of organizations to create a calendar that people like to look at and proud to display.

“If you peruse the online photo albums of groups such as the Portsmouth Area Children’s Theatre, Cirque, the Portsmouth Little Theatre, and so on, you will see they have a lot of really great action shots of art they have created,” Lovins said. “The problem is, though, if you don’t go online, then you won’t know that they have these beautiful photos that capture what is going on. So, when we decided to design this calendar, we wanted to use these photos as examples of what is going on right here in Portsmouth.”

One of the major benefits of the calendar, and a reason Lovins planned the project, is that patrons from all over the community will be able to look at all of the events and plan their schedules to attend them.

It also promotes a healthier partnership with other organization in the community that want to plan an event, but not clash with another group and possibly cause a split in attendance.

Lovins said that she will be taking it one step further in the fall, when she meets with art and music teachers in all the public schools. Teachers in relative fields will all receive a calendar, so that they can plan trips with students.

The calendar features Southern Ohio Performing Arts Association, Portsmouth Little Theatre, Cirque d’Art Theatre, Southern Ohio Museum and Cultural Center, and Linda Tieman’s theatrical department at West Portsmouth High School.

The calendars are $10 and are currently on sale at various community shops, including Mary’s Spirit Shop, Haskins House, The Sweet Boutique, and the Welcome Center. The money raised from the calendars will go towards printing more next year.

More information on each of the groups involved in the project can be found on their individual Facebook pages.

Reach Joseph Pratt at 740-353-3101, ext. 1932, or by Twitter @JosephPratt03.

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