SPARC (Seniors Partnering with Artists Citywide)
The Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island is pleased to announce Seniors Partnering with Artists Citywide (SPARC), a community arts engagement program that places artists-in-residence at senior centers across the five boroughs of New York City. The program provides selected artists with access to workspace in senior centers and a stipend in exchange for the creation and delivery of arts programming for seniors.
Participating seniors will be engaged in an art project or series of cultural programs over the course of the residency, which will also include a public program component - a series of exhibits, open houses and other cultural interactions open to the surrounding community. This initiative seeks to connect artists with seniors in senior centers and positively impact the well-being of seniors through arts-based activities.
Artists will be selected for SPARC through a competitive application process. The submission deadline is September 30th, 2011. For more information, please click on the link to the application materials, or contact Arts in Education Program Director Kelly Kuwabara at kkuwabara@statenislandarts.org.
SPARC is a collaboration among the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Department for the Aging and the City's five local arts councils situated in each borough – Brooklyn Arts Council, Bronx Council on the Arts, Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Queens Council on the Arts. It was developed as part of Age-Friendly NYC, a citywide effort to make the City more livable for seniors, and previously ran as a successful pilot called Space for Art. The program is supported, in part, by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.