Celebrating our Society and Culture through the Literary, Visual, and Performing Arts

We are organizing a school-wide, inter-county (Giles County and New Castle County, located in Southwest Virginia) student exhibition that promotes and celebrates our society, culture, and values through fine arts education. 1. Go to all the schools in the counties and give the principals a letter indicating that we are looking for submissions for our exhibition. Ask that they give letters to the fine arts teachers at the school as well. 2. We already talked to our community center and we can hold an exhibition there. We will be holding two day exhibition. 3. We will organize our exhibition submissions by class and sub-class. a. Literary Arts (Poems and Short Stories) b. Performing Arts (theatre, music, dance) c. Visual Arts (Paintings and Drawings) d. Technology Arts (digital graphics or drawings) Each class will provide an age category but is limited to elementary, middle, and high school students that are student in public schools. We will charge an exhibition entrance fee of $3.00 and free for kids under 10. We will recruit teachers, college professors, art gallery directors, theatre directors to be judges for their class and to choose the top three and give awards like ribbons or a trophy or something. With each art submission, we want the participant to tell why the arts is important part of their life, and why it is important to keep the arts in education! We will have a place for all these comments at the exhibition. Also, we are going put great stuff about why art is so important in our educational curriculum (there is a bunch of statistics online too - we found them quick!). Our community center is going to sponsor us. Also, the Newport Community Action Committee (NCAC) is helping us by providing information for local permits that we need and will talk to the Counties on the Clubs behalf to make sure that we follow the laws for large gatherings. We want to make this an Annual Event that happens every year. can hold this event at the Community Center every year! 4. We are going to speak to our board of education, county officials too. We can put out an advertisement in our newspaper and we can even make signs to put out for our exhibition. 5. Our community center wants us to put together a plan to give them so that they can help us advertise and raise money to so that we can do this! 6. At our exhibition, we will take donations to give back to the schools to help fund arts education. 7. In addition, we will advertise this event to local businesses. We will be sending invitation to our exhibition along with a request to support and fund arts education. We have enlisted the help of adult advisors. The Community Center has agreed to do all the legal stuff for our exhibition. We've already inspired 50 classmates to participate in this exhibition. We have calendared our exhibition to be held in March, 2011.