Huntington Town honored the Chapin family with a proclamation and the unveiling of the Chapin Rainbow Stage sign before a two-hour long concert on Monday, June 29. The concert, which was rescheduled because of inclement weather Saturday night, when Sandy Chapin was honored by the Huntington Arts Council, featured performances by Tom Chapin, Steve Chapin, The Chapin Sisters and the Jen Chapin Trio before a finale featuring all the members of the family.
The Rad Trads opened the 50th Huntington Summer Arts Festival with a bang on Friday, June 26. This New York-based ensemble energetically played their diverse and brassy repertoire ranging from New Orleans second line to Chicago and delta blues, R&B and rock ’n’ roll. For their finale, they moved off the stage, playing among a clapping and happy audience.
The Huntington Arts Council’s Summer Arts Festival is turning 50, and the council is celebrating the anniversary in style.
In honor of the milestone, the arts group will be hosting a 50th anniversary celebration on Saturday, June 27 at 6:30 p.m. During the event, Sandy Chapin, the wife of Harry Chapin and current arts in education chairperson, will be presented with the Huntington Arts Council Harry and Sandy Chapin Arts and Humanitarian Award. The celebration will be held during the opening weekend of the annual festival.
Established in 1963 as a non-profit organization, the council has been hosting a summer arts festival concert series, where Huntington Town residents get to enjoy free music performances from various genres across the nation and the world.
“The town values its long-time partnership with the arts council in funding and presenting the summer arts festival, which continues to be the signature event in the town’s cultural calendar,” Huntington Town Supervisor Frank Petrone said in a statement.
Award winning musicians, actors, dancers and artists perform at the Chapin Rainbow Stage in Heckscher Park from Tuesday through Sunday for 40 nights, with family nights on Tuesday evenings. Musicals like “West Side Story,” “Shrek,” “Nunsense A-men!” and “Peter Pan” will be on this summer. And bands span genres from traditional Dixieland jazz, contemporary folk and classical orchestra to spoken word rap and more.
As the years have gone by, the festival diversified in terms of performers and types of shows, said John Chicherio, the performing arts director at the council and the program director of the summer arts festival.
“The festival has a great mix of styles and genres.”
The Huntington Men’s Chorus and the Huntington Choral Society will kick off the summer arts festival’s first weekend. The groups have performed each year since the festival began.
Chapin is currently the arts in education chairperson for the council. She has been a staunch advocate of the arts for decades, with a strong commitment to arts education — specifically with the Huntington Arts Council Journey program, which she helped launch. The Journey program, established in 1985, is meant to integrate cultural arts into a classroom curriculum. The program runs in six different school districts, including Huntington, Harborfields and Northport-East Northport. Chapin brought her experience as an elementary school teacher to the Journey program to help make it adaptable in the school districts.
Following the celebration at the Heckscher Museum of Art, members of Chapin’s family will perform a concert at the Chapin Rainbow Stage in Heckscher Park. Proceeds from this support the mission of the Huntington Arts Council, which is to enrich the quality of life for Long Islanders through cultural art and musical programs.
“The summer arts festival is a great way to visit good friends and enjoy a summer evening,” Chapin said. “It’s hard to say what has been my favorite part since it’s such a diverse festival.”
The sun has set on SPARKBOOM, a grant-funded program run by the Huntington Arts Council that helped foster young and emerging Long Island artists.
The program was discontinued after its grant ran out, according to Maureen Starr, who does public relations for the council. In an email, Starr said the council wasn’t awarded a Regional Economic Development Council grant from New York State this year.
SPARKBOOM was in existence for two years. The program’s last event was held on April 18 in Huntington.
The program’s goals were to showcase local artists from ages 18 to 34 and try to connect them with opportunities and networking on Long Island through a variety of different events and exhibitions. The program was all-inclusive when it came to the type of art forms it would promote — musicians, photographers, painters, visual performers and more participated in events.
The New York State Council on the Arts, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and the New York State Legislature supported the grant-funded program, along with many other partners.
“We were thinking, what can we do to help emerging artists [who] tend to be underrepresented and are usually recently out of college?” Michelle Carollo said in a phone interview. Carollo was the artistic supervisor for SPARKBOOM.
Carollo helped oversee and organize more than 10 events, which included a holiday party that featured musicians and spoken-word poets, as well as window art and several film screenings with after-parties featuring musicians.
One of her favorite events, Off the Walls, was a block party and street fair in Huntington Station that showcased more than 30 art vendors, a BMX stunt bike show, live Latin dancing and an interactive mural painting.
“This event was unique because we were able to publicize it in two languages, so we were able to attract a much larger audience, and a couple hundred people ended up contributing to the community mural,” she said.
Steven Licardi is a poet who worked with SPARKBOOM and described the experience as “overwhelmingly positive.” He believes that what it did so well was combine art forms and artists on a large scale and show the public how talented Long Island artists are. He also thought that SPARKBOOM was doing successfully what other organizations were either not taking advantage of or not doing as well.
“Long Island has a booming artistic community … I would argue that it’s more than or equally as vibrant and diverse as Manhattan or Brooklyn,” he said in an email. “Long Island is teeming with talented people — particularly young people — who are tempting to redefine and re-imagine what art is.”
Long Island is getting older, and its youth population is smaller than neighboring regions, statistics show.
According to the Long Island Index, the Island’s 55 and older population is growing by about 2 percent per year. The trend started to accelerate in 2007 and is expected to last for another decade. In Nassau and Suffolk counties, 29 percent of residents were over 55 in 2013, up from 25 percent in 2007.
Meanwhile, the number of 25 to 34 year olds was declining through 2007 and has held relatively steady at 11 percent of the population since then. That’s less than other suburban parts of the region and much less than New York City, which stands at 18 percent.
Employment is one of the main reasons young people leave Long Island, according to a Destination LI survey published last year. Nearly 57 percent of millennials were unable to find jobs aligned with their skills on Long Island.
For one young artist, SPARKBOOM helped her advance professionally, she said.
“SPARKBOOM offered me an entryway into performing more meaningful shows on Long Island, a goal I was having difficulty reaching on my own,” Alexa Dexa, a musician who participated in several of the program’s events, said in an email. “As a young artist, it was extremely encouraging to participate in events that fostered a real sense of community, and to be selected on the merit of my work … It was a blessing to have the exposure and funding for my performances that the infrastructure of SPARKBOOM was able to provide,” she said.
Marc Courtade, the executive director of the Huntington Arts Council, said the curtain has closed on the program for the foreseeable future.
“I am sorry to say there are no plans [to keep a program like this going] at the moment,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s unfortunate because it was a very good program, there was really nothing comparable to this program.”
Licardi echoed Couratade’s sentiment.
“The loss of SPARKBOOM is a huge blow to the Long Island arts scene.”
Council head mulls creating new lecture series
Marc Courtade, the new executive director of the Huntington Arts Council, is rolling up his sleeves and getting ready to work.
Courtade follows Diana Cherryholmes as the new leader of the arts organization and officially stepped in to fill her position on March 2. Cherryholmes, who was at the helm of the Huntington Arts Council for more than 16 years, left to work for Suffolk County.
Before joining the Huntington Arts Council, Courtade was the business manager for Tilles Center for the Performing Arts at LIU Post for the past 17 years.
“I am delighted to bring my skills, passion and energy to the Huntington Arts Council, and look forward to helping the arts remain a vibrant part of our community,” he said in a statement.
While at Tilles, Courtade was an integral part of the center’s performance season, where he assisted in planning and organizing many of the performances and special events. At Tilles, he also created the pre-performance series, “Performance PLUS!” while simultaneously producing and acting as artistic director for 10 years. Courtade continues to teach musical theater and opera courses for the honors program at LIU and The Hutton House Lectures at Lorber Hall.
“At the moment, I just want to help to continue the good work and move the organization forward … I’m still transitioning and working on a 50th anniversary reception,” he said in a phone interview. “This is the 50th anniversary of the concerts at Heckscher Park, so we’re currently working on finalizing that programming.”
Courtade said that the planning for the 50th anniversary of the concerts in the park is all still in the works, but he is looking to hold a small reception before the anniversary concert on June 27.
Courtade said that over the years he has given many lectures and would like to continue that while at HAC.
“I would love to begin a lecture series here, presentations about the arts,” he said. “Different art genres. I would like to tailor it across a wide variety of art genres. I would give some and I would like to have speakers from the outside as well on arts-related topics.”
While Courtade’s personal focus is in the performing arts, the Huntington Arts Council offers a wide variety of arts, including both performing and visual.
Courtade said that on April 10, HAC will be holding its opening reception of a self-portrait visual arts show entitled, “I see me!” It will be a juried show and the winners will be announced very soon, he said.
In addition to his involvement at Tilles and now at HAC, Courtade has been a speaker for the New York Council for the Humanities since 2007. He is a frequent speaker all over Long Island and the New York-area.
Before Tilles, Courtade worked in development for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and New York City Opera.
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