Green Art - The Art of Reuse, Recycling, Repurposing and the Environment
The 2007 Accessibility project will be a community-based initiative using ‘the arts’ to inspire the Sumter community to address sustainability and other timely environmental issues. Accessibility2007 will incorporate a holistic and multifaceted approach using a variety of creative art-projects to inform the community about theories and philosophies of reuse, consumerism and recycling in order to generate a public awareness of environmental problems and to encourage people to start talking about sustainability and the conservation of natural resources. The
month-long event will also include weekly films, lectures, demonstrations and discussions involving the community, artists, students, environmentalist and scientist in an ongoing dialogue, hopefully, engendering an ethos of sustainability in the Sumter community.
Accessibility2007 will consist of multiple projects, including two residencies, which will address the issues concerning our present and future.
The Accessibility project has its roots in the "Fall for the Arts" festival formerly hosted by the Sumter County Cultural Commission. In 1998, Cultural Commission volunteer Peggy Chilcutt organized Eve a la Carte, Sumter's first installation project, which focused on the grocery cart—both as medium and statement on its place in our lives. Intrigued and curious members of the public attended the opening at Patriot Hall and came away with an awakened sense of the installation as an art form. Since that time, the annual project, re-dubbed "Accessibility" in 2000, has featured the work of more than 114 artists from around the world and has received recognition throughout the Southeastern US as one of the most important art "happenings" in the region.
Martha Greenway, executive director of the Sumter County Cultural Commission and a previous project director for Accessibility, described the impact of the series to the Columbia Free Times in 2004: "Installation art is confrontational in a friendly way. You can hardly ignore it. It might just make [someone] look at things a little different, even if they just scratch their head and say, 'What…is that?'" Three-dimensional, interactive and engaging all five senses, Sumter's Accessibility project has been a statewide pioneer in bringing this challenging and thought-provoking form to the venue of public art.
Objectives of Sumter’s Accessibility2007 project:
1.Challenge and encourage Sumter-area residents to think about their individual responsibility to adopt a sustainable, environment-friendly, life style.
2. Help foster a new perspective about art by providing opportunities to see and experience how art can be used as a framework for interpreting the connection between man and his environment.
3.Identify opportunities for collaboration and partnership between civic organizations and the industrial sector which can be facilitated through creative arts programming.
4.Promote participation in the arts through inclusive programming that utilizes process driven, insightful, creative projects that use ‘the arts’ to help define the commonality of the community.
5.Provide diverse, ongoing opportunities for artists to experiment with and explore installation and other nature-based art forms.
© Accessibility2007
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