Art organizations were among the first to take financial hits resulting from COVID-19 and could be some of the last to recover, according to an article released by a Vermont news station: Vermont Public Radio (VPR). Specifically for less wealthy and more rural areas of northeast Vermont, things such as performances or visual art displays already occur on a very infrequent basis. Due to pandemic-related restrictions of these types of events, this article shares concerns about the survival of various art organizations and emphasizes how critical the arts can be for fostering a sense of community.
For this week’s client-focused blog post, I made it my intention to locate existing news stories about the prevalence of art in rural communities. While The Crooked House in Milesburg, PA certainly doesn’t hold the exact same art-related implications as the circumstances presented in northeast Vermont, there’s similar challenges in engaging rural audiences.
A target audience that my group has identified for The Crooked House is residents in the immediate Milesburg, and even surrounding Centre County, community. With this in mind, there’s a defining feature of this audience to pay special attention to: a rural landscape. Other towns within Centre County may be more enriched with public art, but The Crooked House sculpture will really serve as the town of Milesburg’s first exposure. In connection to the VPR article, The Crooked House’s architect Ben Fehl also hopes that his art will bring the community together.
However, this article also unfortunately sheds light on the financial challenges that art-related projects and organizations endure. For organizations in rural areas of Vermont, there were a few hardships brought on by COVID-19. For example, philanthropists’ donations plummeted with the stock market and donating businesses gave less, given their own financial crises. As for The Crooked House, the biggest problem is securing the funds needed to complete the sculpture. Even though The Crooked House has received numerous grants over the years and has more recently been granted a nonprofit status, monetary obstacles still stand in the way. In-person fundraising events could be logistically more difficult to approach with social distancing recommendations and government mandates, but have not been entirely ruled out as future tactics that my group brainstormed. Some ways to further engage the Milesburg community are to host a silent auction at the site of The Crooked House and have Fehl give presentations about art and local history to students in surrounding school districts.
Ultimately, my group believes that implementing strategies containing a hybrid of fundraising and awareness initiatives will benefit The Crooked House. Another way that we can aim to inform, and provide more accurate updates, to Milesburg citizens (and to all visitors, too!) is by creating a grab n’ go style pamphlet situated at The Crooked House site itself. In this pamphlet, we could provide a brief timeline of the project and what the sculpture will look like/be once finished. All of these tactics were created with the intention of reaching a rural segment of our Milesburg audience and help further promote The Crooked House in surrounding areas as well.