Jennifer Laine is the executive director of the San Benito County Arts Council and has been in the position since 2010. She recently spoke to the Free Lance about the organization, its initiatives and her own journey to this role.
Free Lance: How far has the arts council evolved since it was launched?
Laine: The arts council was founded in 2006 by a group of individual artists and art supporters basically to reignite the arts council. There had a been an arts commission in the 90s and early 2000s. That was disbanded. So the county did not have an umbrella arts organization that was advocating for the arts and seeking funding and things like that for a number of years.
We started very small. The first executive director was Sharlene Van Rooy who really helped getting the systems up and running. And Stephanie Hicks, who is now with the community foundation, was there for a period of 10 months. I’ve been with the arts council since 2010. So I’ll be celebrating five years this summer. I’d like to say we’ve really come a long way. Our programs have really evolved. Our scope of services and things like that, the number of people we work with, and volunteers, has really evolved, especially our Arts in Education program. That’s been one of our top priorities for the last few years.
In general, why is it important to have an arts council?
An arts council is really vital to any community, but especially in a rural community like ours. It’s important to have a voice for the arts and an organization, a group of people advocating on behalf of the arts. Especially since the economic downtown in 2008, often arts and other activities considered enrichment activities are some of the first to go in either city funding or schools and things like this. So we’re here to help seek funding from outside sources or private sources to help bridge that gap until things improve and make sure the arts are not lost in all that.
What are the areas where this community excels in arts and what are areas where it could improve?
We actually have a pretty vibrant arts community here in San Benito County. And there’s really just such a wide range of artists. So we have the performing arts. We have traditional mariachi and folklorico music. Then we also have garage-style bands. And we also have professional ensembles and community-based ensembles like Mr. O’s Jazz Band, so there’s really a nice wide range there. In the visual arts, we have everything from car painters and pin stripers and more urban artists to more traditional basket weavers and craftspeople. There’s a really strong arts collective in Aromas, the Aromas Hills Artisans. They have such a nice broad base of talented artists and craftspeople there. That’s a very vibrant arts community. We have Western-style painters.
There’s a nice broad range, so the challenges with a rural community is to really create kind of critical mass in the arts. A lot of artists, it also can be related to their kind of work. They might work a little bit isolated. That’s kind of exacerbated by having a wide geographically distributed community. Our job is to bring those people together with things like Open Studios.
That’s one aspect. Another aspect I mentioned we’re working on is Arts in Education. We’re very happy to say most of the schools have the arts in some fashion, but not nearly to the degree that we hope. So we really want every student in San Benito County to have access to arts education and have a quality arts education. That’s an area that there’s so much potential and there’s so much room to grow and improve. We’re partnering with all the districts as well as the San Benito County Office of Ed to work on this and make it happen. We’ve launched a series of teacher workshops.
For you, what from your past has made you good for this role and allowed you to thrive?
I think a few things. One, I grew up in Hollister. I grew up with artists. My parents are artists. I grew up with that background, already with a value for arts. In addition to that, I have a strong connection to the community. Going through the school system and sports and activities, it’s a tight-knit community in many ways. So even now I connect with people that I knew from growing up. Or I knew their parents. Or now I may know their kids. There’s that nice community connection that enables me to do my job well. On the other hand, getting outside the community and getting input from other communities, seeing how other people live and work and have fun, has also inspired me as well. I’ve lived in big cities. I spent a time living in London. I lived in San Francisco. I lived for a period of time in Japan, in Germany. I did my undergrad at Santa Cruz. I did my graduate work in Germany. All that stuff was eye opening for me.
What is going on with the ArtSPACE and how has that gone?
This is really exciting. So, we were in a beautiful space before at the Blak Sage Gallery. But it was a very large space and not entirely accessible even though it was right there on San Benito Street. We kind of shifted our focus. We have this great, large space. We thought, what is our goal? What are we trying to achieve here? Our board and staff agreed—we really wanted to engage the community. Community engagement became the focus, less on the physical space itself. Just in under a year, we’ve gone from having more static exhibitions to having just a lot of activity. On any given day we have art classes going on here, meetings. We have kids coming in. Thursday’s entirely booked. We have back-to-back classes from Life Skills, special needs kids from the high school and Hope Services. Then we have the afterschool art program with students from R.O. Hardin. We have a few evening classes for adults and youth to learn art. The Hollister Art League is hosting their monthly meetings here. There’s just a lot of really great activity.
Anything else?
One thing we didn’t touch on is some of the public art that’s going on. That’s another really exciting development. This year, there were a couple different public art projects going on. That’s a very exciting development to see, and to see the City of Hollister partnering on that and showing their support.
