Arts & Culture Nassau

Evelyn C. McDonald
Arts & Culture Reporter
December 1, 2016 1:50 p.m.

Next Monday is my last Arts & Culture Nassau (ACN) board meeting. My tenure comes to an end on December 31. I have represented the Friends of the Library for the past three years. It’s been an interesting time. ACN is a Fernandina Beach city council with a mission to advocate for and to promote arts and culture throughout Nassau County.

In 2010 Nassau County Commission appointed ACN to be the county’s locally designated arts authority. As such ACN is funded by revenues from the State License Plate Fund. Currently eight arts and culture organizations in the county have appointed representatives to the council and we have two at-large members.

We have undertaken a number of projects in support of our mission. Our first project was to develop a directory of Nassau arts and culture organizations. This was a trifold brochure that we placed in various locations around the county and have kept up to date. At the same time, we developed a website (www.artsandculture.com) where organizations can submit information on events, volunteer opportunities, and other information.

We developed a city resolution governing the review and evaluation of public art on both a temporary and permanent basis. Part of this project also involved developing a proposal request form and instructions as to the elements of a public art proposal that we wanted to evaluate.

Having developed the instructions, we decided to do a project to determine how easy the process was to follow. Our project was the totems representing arts and culture organizations that were installed on Centre Street near the Train Depot. In this project, artists from the Island Art Association paired with arts and culture organizations to create a totem that represented each organization. The installation was meant to be temporary and was removed earlier this year. In recent months we reviewed sculpture proposals for the Egans Creek Park and the Beach Sculpture project.

We canvassed county arts and culture organizations to determine what subjects they would like to know more about. Based on this information, we presented a number of community forums, free to Nassau resident organizations. These forums have been on topics such as use of social media, grant writing, managing non-profit boards, marketing, and others.

It is our hope that our activities will help bring arts and culture to the attention of Nassau County residents and encourage their support. We believe in fostering partnerships between arts and culture organizations that will serve to strengthen all such organizations.

ACN is funded through the sale of specialty license plates supporting the arts. When you renew your auto registration, you might think about selecting the arts plates.

Evelyn McDonald moved to Fernandina Beach from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. in 2006. She is a chair of Arts & Culture Nassau, a city commission charged with support of the arts in Nassau County. She serves on FSCJ’s Curriculum Committee for the Center for Lifelong Learning. She is also the chair of the Dean’s Council for the Carpenter Library at the UNF. Ms. McDonald has MS in Technology Management from the University of Maryland’s University College and a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan.