The Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts (ALCA) located in Blue Mountain Lake, has announced they have been awarded a grant of $295,000 from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). The grant will benefit ALCA’s Adirondack Quad-County Region Statewide Community Regrants (SCR) Program for fiscal year 2023.
The Quad Counties of Clinton, Essex, Franklin and Hamilton counties will see a more than 125% increase in funding to arts organizations and artists, with a priority on funding of Native American and othre indigenous people’s arts, culture and history.
Along with significantly increasing the amount of money the SCR Program will be able to regrant to arts organizations and artists in Clinton, Essex, Franklin and Hamilton counties, the additional funding enables ALCA to expand its offerings and services to the entire four-county region. In addition to the ongoing grant categories of Community Arts and Arts Education, ALCA’s SCR Program is reviving the Individual Artist grants, which have not been offered in the ADK Quad-County region in approximately a decade.
This increase in SCR support means an expansion of both the funding and services ALCA provides to arts organizations and artists in the four-county region, which translates into wider benefits for residents of, and visitors, to the many varied communities within the region, according to Jean-Marie Donohue, Development General Director of ALCA.
We are grateful to NYSCA for this generous increase, which is a validation of the truly indispensable work ALCA has been doing for all four counties in our service area since at least the mid-2010s. We are also excited about the opportunity the increase in funding offers to extend and deepen our service to the abundance of wonderful artists and arts organizations in the region. Although ours is a rural area, the communities we serve range from the City of Plattsburgh to the tiniest hamlets in remote stretches along the Canadian border and in the heart of the Adirondack mountains.
Jean-Marie Donohue
Development General Director of ALCA
Each grant category lists several criteria on which applications are evaluated—for example, artistic merit, organizational competence, service to the community, and local priorities for SCR funding in Community Arts. In this last one, priorities include projects that address areas of distinct cultural deficiency—e.g., programs for underserved rural communities; and projects that focus on, or represent, aspects of our region’s history or cultural identity/diversity. With the presence of the Akwesasne community based north of Franklin County in mind, ALCA’s grants program will add the priority of projects dedicated to Native American and other indigenous people’s arts, culture and history.
As seen above, the exhibit “Journey” at the Tahawus Cultural Center, Au Sable Forks, in Essex County, was presented in Fall 2022 featuring the work of two Town of Black Brook/Clinton County-based artists, painter Heidi Gero and fiber artist Carrie Plumadore, a project supported by SCR funding awarded to the Appleby Foundation, Inc., Tahawus Center and Rebecca Kelly Ballet.
Comments are closed.