Greetings Friends of ArtsAltoona!
I hope everyone is making plans to spend time with loved ones during the holidays!
We have been very busy with all things related to ArtsAltoona.org! We are continuing to make improvements to our website to make it as easy as possible for artists and arts organizations to create profiles and list their events in the calendar!
Thanks to Tiffany Stuckey who has been our primary interviewer for our YouTube channel – ArtsAltoona LIVE! She has been doing a great job of engaging a wonderful variety of people! Please subscribe to our channel, like the videos and encourage your friends to do the same! Let us know your thoughts for future interviews.
We have welcomed Gwen Fisher as our Program Director. She also is working at the LaunchBox, so it is a great opportunity for us to maximize our use of that Penn State Altoona resource! Gwen has gotten off to a great start with working to get our executive leadership team more organized. It’s the proverbial “herding cats” sort of task – only these cats have very busy schedules and lots of commitments to juggle! We are VERY grateful for Gwen’s management skills!
We are planning a Retreat for Saturday, January 6th to integrate our long-term and newer members. We will be developing our priority projects for the next year to 18 months. If you are interested in joining us, just let us know- we are always happy to have new volunteers!
The former Kress Building – soon to be home to artist studios, galleries, and gift shop!
I saved the biggest news for last – we now own a building! The former Kress building on Eleventh Avenue across from Railroad City Brewing Company was given to our 501 (c) 3 organization, Altoona Renaissance Team, Inc as a tax write off! We are looking forward to working on this project to create artists studios and a gallery/gift shop, similar to the Millworks in Harrisburg. More about our plans will develop over time!
Thanks again to Tony DeGol for the amazing work he did with the articles in this newsletter! I knew he was a very good writer, but I didn’t know that he could wax poetic!
Thanks to all who have contributed in any way to our ArtsAltoona endeavors to enrich the economy of Altoona and Blair County through building on the existing strong base of the Arts and enhancing and expanding it! Please let us know if you want to do more!
Enjoy the upcoming weeks and we’ll see you in the New Year!
Donna