The Raygun Building, which was a perfectly located gallery space, also housed a notable t-shirt company known across the Midwest. The pandemic not only resulted in a loss of audiences and live events, but many of our students also lost significant percentages of their income. After securing the stage, the team worked with district businesses and decided to use gallery space in the Raygun Building and the Cherry Building, an artist colony located near the stage. Friday nights in the spring are particularly busy for the district, which meant high visibility in the community. The NewBo City Market, which rents the outdoor Banker’s Trust Stage, was immediately enthusiastic about the idea and suggested that Kirkwood use the evening of April 30, 2021, to kick off the NewBo Outdoor Concert Series. Central to the plan was securing the NewBo venues. A cross-departmental team representing the arts and humanities areas began engaging in bi-weekly conversations to plan the event.
In a time of uncertainty, while faculty and staff had once again moved to remote work, the Kirkwood Celebration of the Arts was born. This location, a community cultural treasure, features an outdoor stage and is surrounded by several large, well-ventilated gallery venues that could be utilized to display student work. The group decided, at the peak of rising COVID-19 numbers in the community, to take the risk and begin planning a late spring outdoor event in the New Bohemia (NewBo) district of Cedar Rapids.
Art of charm time of uncertatinty how to#
In December 2020, faculty and staff representatives from Kirkwood’s Arts and Humanities, Admissions, and Marketing departments and KCCK-Iowa’s Jazz Radio Station, which is housed at Kirkwood-came together to discuss how to safely bring the audience back to our students, and, at the same time, engage with the larger Cedar Rapids, Iowa, community to demonstrate that the arts continued to thrive despite the pandemic. The thrill of the live audience was gone. Theatre auditions were done through video submission and the concert hall became a glorified recording studio, where concerts and productions were recorded and then streamed to the public. The fall focus shifted to safely engaging in high aerosol producing activities like glass blowing, singing with masks, and using apps to record individual pieces of music and splicing them together.
Kirkwood Community College, like numerous other institutions, scrambled to figure out how to get art materials, microphones, speakers, and Internet access to students as they isolated at home. The COVID-19 pandemic forced many students in the visual and performing arts to create in boxes on computer screens with spotty picture resolutions and sound distortions, depending on Internet speed, the weather, devices, and countless other factors. In March 2020, the give and take, central to creating art, was gone. Students are drawn to the arts through their desire to create, perform, express, and interact with other people.
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