In the first week of April, a celebration of Arts & Humanities called Carnival ah! will be hosted at ACC's Rio Grande Campus. Program Director Jodie Jinks, the theater director at ACC, and Dean of Arts at ACC, Lyman Grant, have organized meetings with a few dozen local art groups, including representative Grady Hillman, who is quoted as saying that "Austin does not have a good reputation of being a community arts town."
Meetings, like the one that occurred Feb. 20, served as a planning stage for Carnival ah!, as representatives from all kinds of art groups pitched ideas with intention of building a communal arts service. Hillman stated that community art began as a way to reach out to hospitals, immigrants, the homeless, etc., and now, it has filtered into architecture and the environment. Hosting the event at RGC will, they hope, be a way to get students involved as well.
While the partnership of organizations has every intention of becoming a widespread community, some smaller ones like Austin Green Art seemed a little disheartened to be in competition with the bigger ones. Executive Director Randy Jewart expressed concerns about "not having enough resources or volunteers," but Grant tried to diffuse the conflict, declaring that Carnival ah! is just a component of a "broad outreach of small and large organizations to promote to all kinds of community arts audiences."
Along with Austin Green Art, some other groups participating include; Art From the Streets, who provide resources for the homeless, Austin Museum of Art, and the Theater Action Project, which serves thousands of children in 50 Austin schools. Janet Seibert stressed that the end result is bigger than Carnival ah!, stating that "community arts is not an event, it's a process."
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