Why Not Here

 

It's not too late to sign up for the ArtFul Tour to Ashland on Thursday, May 24!

The tour will be led by Marie Rasmussen. This excursion will feature a guided tour of the Schneider Museum of Art at beautiful Southern Oregon University and matinee performance of Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Romeo & Juliet.

The cost is $60 per person which includes round trip transportation on a luxury coach bus (from the Arts Center) and admission to the museum and play. The bus will leave the Arts Center at 8:00am for Ashland and return at around 5:00pm Registration is limited to the first 39 registrants, so act now! Call 541-672-2532 to register, or drop by the Arts Center in person!

Last year's ArtFul Tour to Portland was lots of fun for everyone involved, so we hope you'll join us for this trip to Ashland! To learn more about the Schneider Museum of Art, click here. To learn about OSF's Romeo & Juliet, click here.

--the UVAA Staff

Again, I am forced to ask why is this not happening here.

Yes, Roseburg is on Highway 5 with a direct shot at all of the bright lights and big cities, but that just make the desirability of a tour even more compelling for places like Coos Bay, North Bend and Bandon. We don’t have that straight path to the events of the bigger venues and maybe we just lack the interest.

I’ve mentioned my own reluctance to devote four or five hours to get to Roseburg and maybe eight or ten to travel to Salem, Eugene or Portland. I’m just too antsy to sit still that long behind the wheel. But if someone else was doing the driving and I could sit back and hat those hours on the road might go faster. They certainly couldn’t go any slower. So why is this happening in Roseburg and not here on the coast?

Are Coastal artists that insular? Is it people just don’t want to be exposed to the bigger venues and so the tours don’t bother with the cities along the sea? That certainly could be the answer. But I’ve noticed even the senior centers and living facilities don’t offer shopping excursions to Roseburg. I guess everything anyone could want is right here in Coos County.

 

Could it be that interest is so low that it isn’t worth the effort? That could be a reason why the tour is taking folks from Roseburg to Ashland and not from along the sea. But then there are no tours of anything else so far as I have been able to discover.

We do have a wonderful museum and the director and staff spend endless hours working hard to keep the doors open and the lights on and yet, could this sort of excursion be the right kind of community outreach which would motivate artists along the coast to see a wider world? Guess we won’t know and I shouldn’t put anything else on the shoulders of the museum staff. They have enough to do to keep the museum open in spite of The Not-So-Great Depression.

But if the museum won’t sponsor this kind of expedition is there no one to step into the void? Surely we have enough bright and energetic people here and along the coast that some sort of grass-roots effort could be mounted.

One of the great hazards of any kind of creative work is the danger of growing stale. If you see the same events and the same folks at the same venues all of the time, year in and year out, will you become just another provincial putterer?

Yeah, I noticed one more thing I’ve assigned to the community without so much as a single hint at how it might be accomplished. That’s the fun of any event, not the doing which is just the result of hard work, planning and working together but the spark of imagination which fires the spirit until it can’t be contained and bursts forth in an idea which has to be shared and developed. That’s where the fun hides.

And yes, there are three or four extraordinary people in our community who will think about this and add it to the list of a dozen or so projects they already have going cause you see those who do do more and they will find the time and energy to make a thing happen without the bags of money that most projects seem to take, without the support of more than a handful of the folks in the community, without the excuses and the whining that so many people feel compelled to voice even for a little effort, they’ll manage and they’ll make it happen. But just this once, maybe we shouldn’t wait for them to do the job they always seem ready to do, maybe we should take up the slack, maybe we should speak up.

Any one up for a road trip?