Salina Art Center, Inc.

Purpose: Serving as Centers of Community Engagement The Salina Art center's Creating with Community project will deepen community roots as it enhances the museum's capacity to exhibit, interpret, and respond. Three integrated strategies-curating with community, thematic partnerships, and communication structures-will reinforce and develop the art center's growing role as a place for community exchange. These approaches rely on the participation of individuals and groups as partners in the creation of an exhibition project, programs and interpretations, and information resources, and as creators of opportunities for deeper responses to art. The art center will collaborate with individual community resources to select a yearlong exhibition project. Individuals from a variety of expertise areas (e.g., scholars, artists) will participate in developing a project theme, an exhibition, and programs with local, regional, and global relevance. The art center will rely on the Salina Public Library and others to provide background information, programming, and other resources to extend the theme and content of the exhibition. The art center will develop its working structure to create responsive ways to acknowledge and experience ideas and questions that arise through community life, artistic explorations, and personal concerns, using a participant web of panels and other audience-driven communication forms.