Newalbanism – for the record

I’ve sent the following to everyone on the mailing list for Destinations Booksellers:

Friends,

Destinations Booksellers has worked hard over the past six years to promote the arts, particularly public art. We organized the original New Albany ArtsWalk, which frankly fizzled, but ultimately ended with the establishment of an officially recognized Cultural District in 2010. We also note with pride the installation of 5 amazing pieces of public art this year as part of the city’s celebration of its impending bicentennial.

That public arts program is being organized by the New Albany Urban Enterprise Association and the Carnegie Center for Art & History, Inc., but the funding comes from people like us who recognize that art that is freely available to the entire community is a boon to all of us, whether we’re residents or visitors.

On Saturday, Nov. 27, we will be hosting a Reading Relay Marathon from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. We need you to volunteer your time and/or open your checkbooks to ensure that the beginning of public arts in New Albany is not also its ending. Contact the store if you will pledge $1 or more per minute for a 30-minute segment. All proceeds will go to benefit public arts programs in New Albany. We want to see new installations of public art each year. If you agree, now is the time to show your support. Randy invites you to read more about it at his personal blog, The NewAlbanist.

Last year, on the Saturday following Thanksgiving, our store, Destinations Booksellers, hosted a serial reading of Christmas-themed books that lasted from 7 a.m. to midnight. It was wildly successful in raising money for CAPE, the local pre-school literacy program.

From all accounts, charitable giving to local non-profits is down considerably this year, so we’re toning down the marathon aspects of this year’s Reading Relay Marathon to run for only 10 hours. And this year, we’re inviting our guest readers to choose their own readings. After all, Nov. 27 is hardly Christmas, no matter how many retailers try to tell you it is.

As it was last year, our Reading Relay Marathon is an event independent of, but coincident with the city of New Albany’s Holiday Fest. We kick off at 9 a.m. while the city’s event runs from noon to 6 p.m. Thus, the RRM 2011 serves as bookends for the city’s event – we start earlier and go later.

This year we’re also participating in the Jingle Walk wine tasting event during the afternoon. You can sample wines at locations all over the downtown area for a single admission price to benefit the programs of Develop New Albany.

We’re directing our efforts this year to help fund the second year of New Albany’s amazing public arts project. The Urban Enterprise Association and the Carnegie Center for Art & History are managing this program during the runup to the city’s bicentennial in 2013, but funding relies exclusively on giving by you and all those who want to help create some reality to our newly minted Cultural District, the successor to the ArtsWalk program we tried to start a few years ago.

Here’s how you can help:

You can volunteer to read for 30 minutes, as one of 20 volunteers that day. We’d like for you to gather up pledges of $2 per minute to support your reading, but we won’t object if you gather even more.

We know that most of you probably prefer not to read aloud, but you can still make a major contribution to support public arts programs. If you can’t read, please drop by during the day to hear someone else read from a favorite book. We ask you to pledge $1 a minute for one of our volunteers – $30 to help pay the artists for 2011 for the time and materials they consume in fashioning their creations for the coming year.

This year we’ve been blessed with 5 incredibly impressive exhibitions that are still in place for you to see. Right now, they could be pulled at any moment. Without sponsors (people who actually pay for these public sculptures), they could easily go away. Why not stop by the Carnegie Center on Saturday, Nov. 27, so they can show you where each of these outdoor sculptures are emplaced?

For reading volunteers, we invite you to make your own selection of material. It can be chapters from a favorite book or poetry collection. It can be a favorite children’s story, a compelling passage from a great novel, or even an especially witty piece of humor. We won’t censor you – we’ll just time you (and take your pledges).

At the end of the day, we’d like to be able to write a check of at least $1,500 to benefit public arts. That’s not even enough to pay for the materials on 1 public sculpture, but it’s a start and it will help keep this program going. Personally, I don’t intend to let this stop with the bicentennial. There’s no reason we can’t have a robust public arts scene in New Albany that goes on for years. What we gained in 2010 is already something to be very proud of. Let’s make New Albany’s Cultural district a destination for visitors for years to come. That “making” starts anew with our Reading Relay Marathon.

Call now to pledge and/or to sign up as a volunteer reader or e-mail us at the store.

To: Destinations Booksellers
Re: Reading Relay Marathon
Phone 812-944-5116
e-mail destinationsbooksellers@gmail.com