So, what would you say you do here?
“The Bobs” from Office Space, 1999 by Twentieth Century Fox and Cubicle, Inc.
There’s not a quick answer to that question, but let’s start with this:
The South Carolina Arts Commission does three things:
- artist development,
- community arts development,
- and arts education
through four means:
- direct programs,
- staff assistance,
- partnerships,
- and grants.
The Hub serves as… a hub for the promotion of news items related to all those things. (The “Arts Daily” section serves as a centralized – what’s the word? – hub for promoting statewide arts events.) On a given week, you can see posts that serve to promote any number of those things. It’s critical for this outlet to do that because if you’re a tax-paying South Carolinian, your income comes to Columbia through the Department of Revenue and can return to your community from our agency by those four means. For the current fiscal year that ends in two weeks, we’ve helped provide one, some, or all the three things we do to all 46 counties.
In short, we use The Hub to tell you how we’re attempting to be good stewards for your money. It’s not an election-year gimmick, but it’s here every year, on as many days as workload allows.
The programs, artists, and ventures are not just lofty ones perched on the peak of Mount Olympus. No, we’re also using arts and culture to make Allendale, Bamberg, Barnwell, Colleton, Hampton, and Jasper counties feel like they have a slice of the peak as new perspectives converge to address old problems. We help schools integrate the arts (top, right) into their curricula to foster creativity and critical thinking in new generations. We also enable artists to contribute to a $9.7 billion sector of the state economy by helping them not only further, but monetize their skills (bottom, right) to provide themselves sustainable income.
That’s where your money goes, and it’s important for you to know that all the time, not just when differing opinions on funding collide – because it’s your money, entrusted to our professionals to impact all South Carolinians.
Two things you might have noticed here and/or our social media outlets lately are renewed emphasis on a) promoting what “SC Artists” are doing (spoiler alert: they are a wildly successful lot) and b) how “SCAC Grants At Work” are being put to work. Here is today’s example, which happens to encompass both. The grantee artists used an S.C. Arts Commission grant to take an art form often assumed to be reserved for Olympus right to Main Street:
Here’s to seeing plenty more of this, all the time.