Culture
National Endowment for the Arts leaders to visit Athens and Nelsonville later this month
< < Back toWASHINGTON, D.C. – Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD, and members of the National Council on the Arts, will gather in Ohio June 27-28, 2024, for the council’s summer meeting.
Over two days of site visits and public events in Athens, Nelsonville, and Columbus— organized in collaboration with the Ohio Arts Council—the chair and council will explore the importance of the arts in rural communities in Ohio and throughout the nation.
On Thursday, June 27, Chair Jackson and the council will visit Athens and Nelsonville.
In Athens, they will visit Passion Works Studio, which creates opportunities for people with and without developmental differences to explore and socially connect through the process of making collaborative art. Following that visit, they will meet with members of the Mount Zion Black Cultural Center for a tour of local sites in this Southeastern region of the Ohio River Valley’s Underground Railroad to learn more about their participation in the NEA initiative Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design and efforts to restore the 120-year-old Mount Zion building into a vibrant community center.
That evening at Stuart’s Opera House in Nelsonville, Chair Jackson will join Ohio Arts Council Executive Director Donna S. Collins, Ohio State Representative Jay Edwards, and special guests for a Town Hall meeting. The event will begin with a reception at 5 p.m., hosted by the Ohio Arts Council, followed by the Town Hall at 6:15 p.m.
This event is open to the public; RSVP in advance. The meeting will also be available through a live webcast at arts.gov (no advanced registration required).