AIR DATE AUGUST 5, 2021

Title:  American Artist Appreciation Month

In this episode of Emily Tells All, during American Artists Appreciation Month, we take a dive into the Orange County art industry.

Guests and Locations

Orange County Government, Director Arts, and Cultural Affairs – Terry Olsen

Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Curator – Gisela Carbonell, Ph.D.

The Arts in Orange County: From Galleries to Front Yards

The arts enliven our communities, reflecting our diversity, our history, and our hopes for the future. They’re also flat-out fun. But how do arts organizations bring exhibitions and performances to the public? And how do they decide what to support?

I spent some time with two mainstays of the Orange County arts scene to learn what they do, and how they balance artistic judgment with their mission to make the arts available to the widest possible audience.

Gisela Carbonell is the curator at Rollins College’s Cornell Fine Arts Museum, where she oversees a permanent collection of roughly 6,000 pieces. Cornell’s primary mission is to support instruction at Rollins, but the museum takes its role in the community seriously. Students lead tours of the museum for members of the general public, and Carbonell herself offers tours in Spanish.

Its public spirit extends to Cornell’s collection itself. Visitors to Cornell’s galleries notice, says Carbonell, “that we have artists included in our collection and in our exhibitions that represent the diversity and variety of our community here in Florida.”

One of Cornell’s current exhibitions, Multiple Voices/Multiple Stories, is a case in point. Guiding me through the exhibition, Carbonell noted that “we have here a range of artists of different ages, different stages in their careers, different backgrounds and ethnicities to tell stories from a multiplicity of perspectives.” The exhibition’s works are arranged specifically to represent a sort of conversation that extends far beyond the gallery’s walls. Visitors “can enjoy looking at art, but also, hopefully have that opportunity to open the door to reflect about certain historical issues, or think about themes from a different perspective that perhaps we haven’t considered before.”

If Carbonell has done great work toward bringing the public to the arts, Terry Olson has built a 20-year career out of bringing the arts to Orange County. As Director of the Orange County Arts and Cultural Affairs Office­, or Chief Arts Instigator as he likes to call himself, Olson develops arts programming and helps artists secure the funding they need to keep going. “It’s about bringing our community together,” he says, “creating community-wide things.”

Olson’s latest community-wide thing is FusionFest, a weekend-long celebration of Orange County’s cultural diversity held each year immediately after Thanksgiving. From the start, FusionFest sought to represent the entire community. “A number of years ago, the county was interested in exploring how we might support diversity more. And I called a number of people together from different heritages. And we asked the question, how can we best share our heritage?”

What started as a parade and food fair grew into a full-fledged festival of arts, music, and dance in 2018, and attendance doubled in 2019. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, FusionFest morphed for a year into the Frontyard Festival, bringing the celebration through the streets off Orlando and straight past people’s front doors.

Olson’s work gets significant funding from Orlando’s tourism tax, and an important part of his job consists of making sure that public money is distributed wisely and fairly. “We do three workshops in May,” he notes, “to help people understand what they need to do…. That process is not easy. It takes a bunch of work, some knowledge, and some finances.”

Helping artists with the business side of things may take a bit of extra work, but Olson says the effort is worth it. “We have a lot of talent here,” he reflects. “And a lot of those people either are laid off and decide to stay or just decide, I want to invest in this community either full-time or on the side…. So that gives us a really wonderful group of artists to pull from.”