A working
artist and a transplant to Oil City is trying to find others who want to
make her story their own.
Joann
Wheeler, a longtime artist and native of Pittsburgh, was hired last month
to serve as Oil City's downtown arts revitalization champion. The position
puts her in charge of recruiting artists and promoting the city's downtown
as a live-and-work environment for artists. The venture is one piece in an
economic growth plan that city council has elected to undertake.
"I'm thanking
Oil City for getting behind an effort like this," Wheeler said at a Take
Pride in Oil City meeting this week. "For me, it's a dream job."
Wheeler
received early art training at home and in classes at the Carnegie Museum
and at Carnegie-Mellon University's school of fine arts. Having lived and
worked in Germany's Black Forest and in the Boston area, her
three-dimensional collages and boxes have been exhibited and sold in
juried group shows at galleries in Somerville, Mass., Cambridge, Mass.,
Blue Hill, Maine, and in Boston.
She's also
done solo exhibits at the Cambridge Public Library and in Oil City's
Transit Fine Arts Gallery, where she also was an artist of the month in
2004.
Wheeler moved
from Boston to Oil City 10 years ago because she wanted to get her
overhead down and find more time to devote to creating art. She had worked
since 1997 as executive director of the Clarion/Venango Education Resource
Alliance.
Before that,
however, she had seen personal artist friends who also fled larger cities
because they craved slower paces, lower costs and the small-town feeling
outside urban boundaries. She has seen the Oil City arts revitalization
model work in other areas.
With
first-hand experience of doing exactly what Oil City is looking to promote
on a larger scale, Wheeler said Oil City "can take this in so many
directions. The only thing we can't do is stop."
Arts
revitalization goals primarily look at using existing real estate stock
and growing and diversifying the city's small business base. The
initiative also aims to attract and retain a quality workforce and attract
wealth to the area.
Wheeler said
that business and artistic ventures - from visual to performing arts -
complement one another. Ten-year-old estimates projected that each dollar
spent on arts in a community brought $4 back in related and spin-off
businesses.
"This is a
low estimate. The figures now are higher," Wheeler said.
Coming from a
visual arts background, Wheeler is heavily basing her work around visual
arts, but she is relying on the help of a local artist advisory council to
help her locate artists who practice in other mediums and tailor the
city's assets to their needs, too.
From her
experience, she knows that people who buy fine art come from corporate
circles, from municipalities, architectural and design firms, museums,
collectors and individuals arenas.
"These are
all the kinds of people we would like to attract to Oil City," she said.
"If we do this right, everybody benefits."
Relocating
artists should be able to find affordable real estate, welcoming
surroundings, a supporting community, access to markets like Pittsburgh,
Cleveland, Buffalo and New York, and a home base in Oil City. The
community, conversely, would see the reuse of vacant second-story housing
and a revitalized business district.
"What I see
here is potential," Wheeler said. "We need to pull together to make sure
these (second-story) spaces are reused to the best of their ability."
Moving a
critical mass of artists to the city's downtown would allow essential
supporting businesses to grow.
"But what we
need to do is attract these people," she said. "What we need first is for
the community to come together and support the artists we have here
already."
That's going
to rely on the city, local real estate agents and financial institutions
offering financial incentives to artists and longtime residents making the
city "socially friendly" for new residents.
"Open your
hearts and open your minds to whoever comes here," she said.
With
Wheeler's part-time salary set at just $15,000 for a year, another $4,000
allotted for miscellaneous expenses will be plugged into marketing the
city to out-of-the-area artists. To that end, she has created a link to an
Oil City arts Web site through her personal site with links to area
resources and a description of the local arts initiative. Wheeler's Web
site is www.artsoilcity.com/html.
"Artists are
going to need this information," she said. "Ideally, I would like to see
us marketing nationally."
That will
involve a large electronic marketing campaign, targeting artist gathering
spots on the Internet, strategically placing advertisements and planting
fertile seeds in the minds of other artists who will make other artists
realize they need to live and work in Oil City.
"We need
artists talking to other artists about how good this place is," Wheeler
said. "They need to be happy and thriving and talking to other artists."
Artist
transplants ideally would be a mix of established and up-and-coming
artists.
"If we
attract only established artists, in 10 years we're going to have a
retirement community," Wheeler said. "Newer artists would stand to foster
relationships, grow and help with bringing in business."
"I'm looking
forward to this," she told the Take Pride contingent. "I think we're going
to have a great time together."
She is
looking for the support of artist-minded community members to serve on an
artist advisory council, to help with artist support programs, events and
competitions, marketing and creating financial incentives for artists.
She may be
reached between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays in her
first-floor National Transit Building offices or by calling 676-5303.
