Saratoga Arts is baaaack…
After staying front of mind via events all over town, Saratoga Arts is ready to reopen its downtown locale with major fanfare on Jan. 9.
They put on art exhibitions and show photography. They take chances on rising live music acts and throw themselves into experimenting with genres.
In other words, Saratoga Arts (on the corner of Broadway and Spring) is a crucial part of the “creative fabric” that our town is so famous for. And now they’re celebrating the completion of their newly-renovated digs.
“I want Saratoga Arts to be a place where people get used to walking by at night and going, ‘Let’s just walk in and see what they’ve got going on,’” says Spencer Sherry, the organization’s grants and community outreach guy. “We’ve put in new theater equipment, new lights, new sound, a new sound booth projector. We have a lot more utility out of the space now. There’s also now a door in our downstairs classroom space that leads out onto the patio, so we’ll be able to do programming out there and some classes and workshops.
Now we’re right in the park and can put a band there — let’s just do stuff!”
To celebrate, on Jan. 9 Saratoga Arts will host a 10 a.m. ribbon cutting ceremony and a 6 p.m. cocktail party featuring performances by the Curley Lamb Nu-Soul-Jaz Trio with Sam Zucchini.
Conveniently (for me), our new Poet Laureate, Jay Rogoff, was asked to read a poem at both events and said he was “delighted.”
“The arts are essential to our moral and psychological wellbeing,” he says. “They make a community worthy of memory. My wife is an art historian, and she likes to point out that we don’t remember the Medici because they were great bankers, but because they supported Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo and dozens of other artists who created the Renaissance.”
Beautiful.
By the following day, Saratoga Arts will be in full swing, with drop-in workshops from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., tours (every 30 minutes) from 1 to 3 p.m., and an opening reception for its High School All Stars Exhibition at 5 p.m.