Meetinghouse Art in Freeport recently announced it has been approved to receive a project-specific $25,000 Our Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. This matching grant will support the project “Our Town: A Community Self Portrait.”
“The National Endowment for the Arts is pleased to support a wide range of projects, including Meetinghouse Arts’ ‘Our Town: A Community Self Portrait,’ demonstrating the many ways the arts enrich our lives and contribute to healthy and thriving communities,” NEA Chairperson Maria Rosario Jackson, Ph.D., said in a prepared release. “These organizations play an important role in advancing the creative vitality of our nation and helping to ensure that all people can benefit from arts, culture and design.”
Led by Meetinghouse Arts former board member Evan Haynes, “Our Town: A Community Self Portrait” is an arts-based, documentary project. In the spring 2024, the public will be engaged to photograph and write about the people, places, objects, traditions and activities that exemplify what is most meaningful and unique about Freeport. Their work, a collective snapshot of the present time, will be the basis for an exhibition and conversations in the fall. The project is inspired by the Freeport Downtown Vision Plan. As with the development of that plan, residents and community organizations will be broadly encouraged to help articulate a town identity.
Meetinghouse Arts, as facilitator and producer, will put art tools in the hands of those who may not consider themselves artists or community planners. It will provide photography and writing workshops, cameras, journals, and digital access for submissions. Work will be exhibited at multiple locations throughout Freeport, printed as postcards, projected on buildings and archived at project partner Freeport Historical Society. Meetinghouse Arts will host facilitated conversations in response to the art.
The grant is one of 57 grants nationwide that the NEA has approved in the Our Town category. These creative placemaking grants support projects that integrate arts, culture and design activities into local efforts to strengthen and authentically engage communities, center equity, advance artful lives and lay the groundwork for long-term systems change.
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