Spartanburg arts executive to keynote Arts Council’s Creative Conversations event

Jennifer Evins, President and CEO of Chapman Cultural Center in Spartanburg, South Carolina, will be the featured speaker at the September 17 Creative Conversations Network gathering sponsored by The Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County. The Arts Council will host the event in the Mountcastle Black Box Theatre at the Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts located at 251 North Spruce Street in downtown Winston-Salem. It begins at 5:30 p.m.

Admission is free and the public is invited. Light refreshments will be served after the presentation and attendees will have an opportunity to meet and visit with Randy Eaddy, newly appointed President and CEO of The Arts Council.

“Throughout the nation, arts councils have been evolving rapidly,” said Eaddy.  “They are going from strictly annual united arts fund vehicles to organizations that make shared services and collective capacity building possible within the arts community as well as provide facilities and do traditional grant making. Jennifer Evins will explain how this process has worked in Spartanburg at Chapman Cultural Center, and we can discuss as a community how their experiences relate to our work and mission here .”

For more than a year, The Arts Council, in partnership with the Triad Podcast Network, has been producing monthly podcasts featuring area leaders and arts industry experts. With stories of its own past and present to inspiration from other communities, the conversations have focused on building community through the arts. In addition, the Creative Conversations Network has invited Winston-Salem and Forsyth County residents to join in the conversation through a quarterly speaker series sponsored in part by the Morris and Lillian Sosnik Memorial Fund.and featuring national leaders such Evins.

“Our aim is to have these gatherings educate and inspire us and start a dialogue about how lessons learned elsewhere can work for us here,” said Eaddy. “We must always be open to how practices elsewhere might inform our efforts to be more effective, efficient and impactful as we seek to touch every corner of our community.”

Winston-Salem, known as a City of Arts and Innovation, and Forsyth County have a robust arts community that enriches the lives of area residents every day and accounts in large part for the recognition they continue to receive as a great place to live, learn, work and play. The most recent studies available showed that Forsyth County’s nonprofit arts industry supports 5,559 full time equivalent jobs; accounts for more than $129 million in resident household income, and generates more than $14.8 million in local and state tax revenues.