October 2020 - Parks & Recreation - 26

W E A R E P A R K S A N D R E C R E AT I O N

Arts and Culture in Parks and Recreation
Resilience, Reﬂection, Rebuilding: Artists Respond to COVID-19
By Devin Graham

he arts have the remarkable ability to create a sense of togetherness, belonging and community. They can help decrease stress,
loneliness and anxiety. They can provide opportunities to reflect,
process experiences and feelings, imagine what our future might
look like, and connect us through our common humanity. These are all
things echoed in parks and recreation.
The park and recreation field
has the unique opportunity to
create a bridge of access to arts
and culture for the community by
making it attainable.
The Johnson County Arts and
Heritage Center, managed by the
Johnson County Park and Recreation District (JCPRD) Culture Division in Kansas, is comprised of

IMAGE COURTESY OF TIM BAIR AND JUSTIN BORDER,
JOHNSON COUNTY PARK & RECREATION DISTRICT.

The mission of the JCPRD
art exhibitions program is to
celebrate the diversity and rich
culture of our home.

Parks & Recreation

Fine and Performing Arts, Theatre
in the Park, the Johnson County
Museum and the Rentals Department. Through the Fine Arts division, this facility manages five
art exhibitions each year centered
around public engagement with
a focus on local artists, many of
whom are up-and-coming.
The mission of the JCPRD art
exhibitions program is to celebrate
the diversity and rich culture of
our home. It is our goal to create
thought-provoking exhibitions that
encourage a new perspective of
Johnson County's place within the
global community.
The Johnson County Museum's
remarkable team moved quickly to
respond to present times by creating
a historical exhibition on pandemics, called Rising to the Challenge:
Suburban Strength in Difficult Times
(tinyurl.com/y6yh7hwx).
They
reached out to the Arts Council of
Johnson County and the Fine Arts
department staff within JCPRD to
collaborate and discuss the power
of the arts in coping with the mental strain of this pandemic.

The cover of the Resilience, Reﬂection,
Rebuilding: Artists Respond to COVID-19
exhibition catalog, featuring artwork by
Adrian Marsh.

| O C TO B E R 2 02 0 | PA R K S A N D R E C R E AT I O N .O R G

Questions these three teams
sought to answer were: What
is happening in our world right
now? How is our community coping with the ripple effects of the
novel coronavirus (COVID-19)
pandemic? How can we become
a beacon of light for our community and a resource through these
challenging times?
These notions planted the seed
for what would eventually become
Resilience, Reflection, Rebuilding:
Artists Respond to COVID-19, an art
exhibition that hosts 54 local artists
with 64 works of art, including
painting, photography, mixed
media, sculpture, textiles and multimedia (tinyurl.com/y6mgolup).
For the exhibition, the teams put
out a Call for Entry (CFE) requesting local artists submit works along
with an artist statement in direct
response to the global pandemic.
They received more than 90 submissions from the CFE, and after
difficult deliberation and with help
from professional artists within
the greater Kansas City region, a
curatorial team narrowed the submissions down to what is currently on display. The curatorial team
was comprised of myself; Allison
Bowman, administrative assistant for the Arts Council of Johnson County and painter; Kwanza
Humphrey, painter; Jason Piggie,
photographer and videographer;
and Andrew Ordonez, program supervisor for Imagine That! KC and
mixed media artist.
Artist Adrian Marsh states, " ...I

October 2020 - Parks & Recreation

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of October 2020 - Parks & Recreation