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New Faces On Cultural Council Of Northern Berkshire

Cultural Council of Northern Berkshire

Hundreds of cultural councils around Massachusetts disperse state money to arts initiatives. The group that represents Northern Berkshire County has some new faces as it enters a fresh round of funding.

On September 6th, the Cultural Council of Northern Berkshire met in downtown North Adams to welcome new members.

“We give money to organizations, individuals, who are working in the arts and history and sciences, humanities, working with kids, working with adults, working with teens," said Melanie Mowinski, an associate professor of visual arts at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. In addition to representing North Adams on the council, she’s the body’s departing chair. “People apply to put programs out there in the world, and we read their grants and we decided whether or not we’re going to give that state money to them.”

Cultural councils work like this: schools, museums, artists, and other groups that are trying to get state funding send grant applications to the taxpayer-funded Mass Cultural Council. Those that pass muster are then farmed out to individual councils around the state, who decide how to spend their grant money. 

“This year our allocation is $62,000," Mowinski told WAMC, "but, there, surprisingly – and this is sometimes a little frustrating – some people don’t spend all their money that they get the previous year, or something happens and their program falls through, and so we have leftover money from previous years. So we typically, we start with $62,000, and we’ll probably have an additional $5,000 to $10,000 that adds to that. So on average, we have given away over – at least the past ten years – somewhere between $60,000 and $80,000. It’s a lot of money!”

That money goes to the 11 communities within the CCNB’s purview.

“From Hancock to Lanesborough to North Adams, Adams, Cheshire, Clarksburg… all of the ones north," said Ruth Mikulski, the council’s new chair. “In that, we try to have two representatives from each town.”

She’s from Hancock.

“I thought it would be really great because I’m new to the Berkshires," said Mikulski. "I’ve only been here for four years, and so I really wanted to see what was happening in Northern Berkshire County, so I came to the first meeting.”

There are a lot of new faces on the council.

“I just moved here to North Adams about two years ago from Portland, Oregon," said Arthur De Bow, who curates MCLA’s Gallery 51 in downtown North Adams. “And I served for a number of years on RAC, which is the regional arts council organization there which is the large main grant organization for the arts.”

He has a clear vision of his duty as a member of the CCNB.

“To grow the arts and make the arts more accessible to everybody to as broad a diverse selection of population as possible," De Bow told WAMC.

The deadline for grant submissions is October 15th.

“For a lot of people it’s a daunting experience, and I would say that if you don’t try you’re not going to get it and that you’d be surprised how easy the application form is," said Mowinski.

She said the main piece of advice she had for her successor as council chair is to understand the population it serves. Asked to identify a highlight from her year of leadership, Mowinski pointed to an event that brought multiple communities together.

“There’s one in particular – the lantern walk that was at The Clark," she told WAMC. "That was the Clark Art Institute, Pine Cobble, and individual artist David Lane working together to make this happen – and it’s just these different institutions and then the public that came to it. So all these different people were impacted by this one grant, and that is often the thing that often stands for to me is that a lot of the money that we are able to distribute ends up impacting a lot of different people.”

Josh Landes has been WAMC's Berkshire Bureau Chief since February 2018, following stints at WBGO Newark and WFMU East Orange. A passionate advocate for Western Massachusetts, Landes was raised in Pittsfield and attended Hampshire College in Amherst, receiving his bachelor's in Ethnomusicology and Radio Production. His free time is spent with his cat Harry, experimental electronic music, and exploring the woods.
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