March 26, 2007 email to YSCASC

Subject: My vision of a Center for the Arts

Dear Center for the Arts Steering Committee:

Thanks for this opportunity to finally be heard. And please pay attention, because this is very important.

If we are going to have a “Center for the Arts,” I believe we need to build something, something that will truly be a center. I know there is a great deal of sentiment for keeping what we have. For a few people that has translated into not building a physical structure. Some of that may come from fear of controversy about its location. But I feel that if we do not build a true physical center, we will eventually lapse back into what we are, a town bursting at the seams with artists, including a great number of theater people, with no theater and no central point for collaboration.

I feel that the steering committee is taking the right approach in moving slowly, without preconceptions, and trying to include everyone. Perhaps I am just impatient, but I feel that the format of the recent workshops did not provide me (or others) with an adequate opportunity to tell you my vision. It has nothing to do with the four senses we explored in every session, but to do with the one that was so obviously missing: Sight! What I think it should look like!

I am sure you plan to get to that at some later date, but I can’t wait to tell you. I think it should be a building that has at its core an acoustically sound theater with adequate seating. Adjoining it should be a smaller black box theater. There should be a group of studios, appropriate for the different disciplines, and offices enough for all the arts related nonprofits in town.

I believe that from the casual day-to-day contact between artists of different disciplines great ideas will flow. I envision collaborations such as have never before been seen. That kind of contact and those kinds of collaborations will happen only when artists are working side-by-side, or wandering through each others open doors, or sipping coffee with one hand while thumbing through someone’s play, or staring at their painting, or listening to their music, or watching them pirouette…

I like to leave the door to my Community Foundation office at 108 Dayton Street open. Upstairs, there is a yoga studio; next door, a small gallery (formerly Open Books). People stick their heads in. I tell them to pull up a chair. Some of the best conversations/biggest ideas I’ve shared in this town have occurred under those very conditions. I can only imagine what it would be like if there were more artists in the building to rub shoulders with. This is our chance to make that vision come true. This is our chance to be each others muse. We need a true center.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Sincerely,

Virgil Hervey

P.S.

Dated: May 19, 2009

I may poke fun at you from time-to-time on this blog (a humorous metaphor is hard to pass up), but I assure you that you have my personal support in your change of heart about new construction. I hope you will reread my email and consider my ideas anew.