CBS artists donate percentage of sales to fuel the ‘next wave’
By Craig Westcott
An exhibition of paintings and sculptures at the CBS Town Hall earlier this year was not only a success for the artists who displayed and sold their work, but also a boon for the community’s two high schools, which ended up getting a donation for their respective arts programs.
Members of the CBS Visual Arts Committee, which organized the exhibition, attended CBS council earlier this month to present the donations.
The group’s spokesman, David Coates, said the idea for the exhibition flowed from a project it took on earlier in the year, to identify all the known visual artists in CBS.
“When we started, we thought there might be 30 or 40,” said Coates. “We’ve come to find out there is about a hundred active visual artists here in CBS, which is much larger than we expected. We wanted to do a show that broadcast and showed the talent that we have here in CBS. We had 44 individual artists who had one to two or three pieces of art. From that exhibition and sale, we were able to generate funds. It was important for the organizing committee to be able to give back to the schools for the next wave of artists… We believe they’re the next wave and that’s what we want to see, to help them come along, so we’re delighted to be able to provide some funding to their arts programs.”
Mayor Darrin Bent described the exhibition as a great success and thanked the artists for donating 10 per cent of their sales to the schools’ arts programs.
“The Town Hall was transformed into an art galley up in the Greenslade Gallery and down here in the chamber and out in the hallway,” said Bent. “It was a quite well-attended and well-received event, something that we’re very proud to do… It was a fantastic show.”
Coates said CBS’s visual artists are a diverse group.
“It’s not just painters, of which I’m one, but we have sculptors – metal sculptors, woodworking, glass, fabric artists, photography – there’s quite a range of different disciplines, and I believe for that show we covered just about all of them, which highlights again the diversity and the scope of the visual artists that are here in CBS,” Coates said.