Central Maine Arts Educators Invited

Introductory opportunity

You are invited to join the Inaugural Common Street Arts Educators Initiative meeting, 4:00pm on June 10th at the Common Street Arts Gallery in Waterville (on Common Street, across from the Opera House).

Highlights for the meeting include:

* THEME – Building Bridges: Our regional arts histories and futures
* Introductions/reacquainted
* Common Street Arts (AEI) educator/student opportunities (Lisa Wheeler)
* Bridge building/maintenance:
Regional Art Shows / Youth Art Month /
Return of Scholastic
Colby Connections/Field Trips (Lisa Digraph)
* State of the Arts check in – State associations, Maine Arts Assessment
Initiative (Suzanne Goulet)
* THEME – Building Bridges: Our regional arts histories and futures.
A great opportunity to share and glean from each other
Please consider sharing an activity/lesson/reflection tool that
you use
– Volunteer at your own comfort (copies to share?)
* Summer Gathering?
* Future Gatherings?

Please contact Lisa Wheeler, Education Director – Common Street Art at lisa@commonstreetarts.com if you have any questions.

Viles Arboretum Art Symposium

Invitation to Maine Art Teachers and Students for a unique opportunity

The Viles Arboretum is pleased to extend an invitation to all elementary, middle and high school art teachers to sign up for a unique learning opportunity to be held at the Arboretum in Augusta from September 12 – 21, 2014. We will be holding the first Viles Arboretum Art Symposium on our grounds with eight nationally known artists creating stone sculptures from start to finish. The theme will be nature inspired art. During the week days, we will have five very special opportunities for Maine schools to participate in a private audience with one of the artists and to learn first-hand about the artists’ background, involvement in art, source of inspiration, and much more. In addition to this, each field trip class will be able to meet the other artists, ask questions and observe the various techniques for taking raw stone and turning it into a piece of beautiful art. There is no cost to participate. You just have to schedule your bus and students. Staff at the Arboretum will work with you to be sure all the opportunities you wish to create for your students are available. Please call the Arboretum at 626-7989 for more details or to schedule your group.

The Viles Arboretum is centrally located in Augusta, Maine on 224 acres of fields, forests, wetlands and with botanical collections from around the world. We offer an ever-changing selection of inspirational exhibits, educational and practical programs for the general public and for schools. We focus on interactive, creative and hands-on teaching with a focus on botany and natural history. Our goal is to unlock everyone’s natural ability to understand the nature of our world through your own eyes and by using your own intellect.

We strive to make our 224 acres of fields, forests and wetlands, play a key role in contributing to the quality of life for Maine citizens and visitors from every corner of the world. Our presence contributes significantly to the quality of life in and around Augusta and beyond and our newly installed Art Trail presents the largest publicly accessible display of outdoor art sculpture in Maine.

You can learn more about the Arboretum and its programs, or how to become more involved by checking our website at www.vilesarboretum.org, checking our Facebook page or simply by stopping in or calling us at 626-7989.

Your school can apply for the Maine Arts Commission Ticket to Ride funding to use for this opportunity. Please click here to  learn more and download the application. The process is fairly simple and there is a quick turn-around once the application is submitted.