Why the Mountains… Why the Arts?
Since I started working at the AC in December, those two questions have been posed to me time and again by family, friends, my barber, and anyone else who finds out I’ve moved to a town where the figures for population and annual snow fall go toe-to-toe. They’re not always easy questions to answer, depending on your audience.
“After living in Brooklyn for awhile I wanted to try something different,” I tell people, but this doesn’t wipe the inquisitive, possibly suspicious look off their faces. Even after I explain what a gorgeous part of the country I’m living in, and all the unique programs the Arts Center puts out regularly, they still don’t seem to get it. After a brief consideration they’ll say “sure, but does anybody come?”
The answer, most are surprised to hear (and I admit that I was at first, too), is a resounding yes. To people looking in from the outside, it doesn’t make sense that so many people who have chosen to live in such a remote and far-flung area could also have such a vested interest in their community’s art and culture.
The rural lifestyle just doesn’t mix with artistic sensibilities in some people’s minds. For me, the two go together perfectly. Whether it’s a painting, a play, a light sculpture, or one of the fascinating new exhibits planned for the gallery that almost defy classification, art is a reflective process for the person experiencing it. The lifestyle that comes with living in this beautiful, wild region of the country tends to effect a reflective process, too. Like a good work of art, when the grocery store is a 25 mile drive through dramatic landscapes dotted with rivers, waterfalls, and cliffs, it allows you time to satisfy that same urge to consider, to investigate your own thoughts on the world around you. And when a “morning power jog” is really an hour of skiing out across a frozen lake at the foot of Blue Mountain to explore the islands and tracks left by like-minded people before you, it gives you a different perspective on what you do with the rest of your day, just like a good work of art.
This Saturday the Arts Center is having its annual Winter Benefit for the Arts. We’re already nearly full to capacity for the event, putting an exclamation mark on the “yes” to anyone who wants to know if people really come out and show support. I’d like to invite some of the people that asked me those two questions and gave me those inquisitive looks, because I can’t think of a better place to find the answers. Why the mountains? Why the arts? The room will be brimming with people who probably know their answers by heart.
