This community participation gallery show at the Cultural Center will be featured from November 14 until December 29.

Everyone in town or outside of the city is invited to help create images of their vision of individual, family, and community identity on the walls of the Cultural Center gallery during this special community show. Every community group can put their image on the walls: the Lions, the Civic and Commerce Association, New Horizons, the school, churches, the medical community.

Families, individuals, youth and elders, from town and country, please come in to the Center and paint yourselves into the picture of your community.  We’ll have the simple tools needed: paper, markers, paint.  You bring your vision of your town, your place here in rural Minnesota and paint your story on the Cultural Center walls.  Everyone with any connection to New York Mills can participate: if you have friends or family here, or you work here, or you shop here, or you participate in the Cultural Center, stop in and make your story part of the community story.

Can’t draw?  We’ll  have materials that you can use to make a collage image from magazines.  You don’t need any art experience to help make a creative statement about your life in this community in 2012.

Then, in December, we’ll celebrate all of our images and stories that tell about who we are and who we hope to be as part of the day-long celebration on December 21st.   The celebration of “Our Town” will be held all day long on Friday, December 21st from 10am to 4pm.  Then, we’ll reconvene with our annual Longest Night Music Festival at 7pm later the same day.