Laying the foundation

Photo: Claire Wiley // Arts Council of Park City and Summit County.

When asked what she considers the Arts Council of Park City & Summit County’s signature effort, executive director Jocelyn Scutter paused. “The Summit Arts Market is one of the council’s longest-running events,” she mused, explaining how it began at the Cattleman’s Hall in Kamas before moving to The Oakley Red Barn in 2015, where it’s been held on a Saturday in mid-July ever since. There’s also the Monster Drawing Rally, that Jocelyn described as “a really fun art party” the Arts Council throws annually in September with the Kimball Art Center. And then there’s Art on the Trails in late August, and the Latino Arts Festival, which now attracts 11,000 attendees over its three-day run at Canyons Village in mid-June. “But I think the program that best showcases the Arts Council’s mission in action is the CREATE PC Local Artists Collective,” she said.

Simply put, CREATE PC provides local artists with both sales opportunities and physical space to produce their work. In 2019, the Arts Council began meeting this need through various pop-up locations around Park City, mostly on Main Street. “But as you know, rents on Main Street are pretty prohibitive,” Jocelyn says. Then, in late 2023, the council secured a two-level space at 1500 Kearns Boulevard, just behind thest behind the Tupelo restaurant. There, an artist market, featuring the work of 32 local artists (open Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 6 p.m.), occupies the first floor, and on the second floor, 12 local artists share a studio space where they can create, collaborate, meet with clients, and host open studio nights. “So many artists had come to us wanting to know how to break into the scene in Park City and wanting a place to create their work away from the isolation of their home studios,” Jocelyn said. “The CREATE PC Arts Collective has become an essential resource where locals and visitors can go to see and purchase local art, and where local artists can mingle with one another and get their art seen. So far, the CREATE PC has had almost one million dollars in sales, all of which goes directly into the artists’ pockets.”

But buoying local artists isn’t the only way the Arts Council is championing art in Summit County. Its website, pcscarts.org, is a treasure trove of local art-specific beta, featuring a regularly refreshed blog and events calendar. The site also includes the council’s Art Adventure video guides, featuring local artists and athletes like Bridgette Meinhold and Caroline Gleich talking about their favorite art-meets-adventure experiences.

Another way the Arts Council is weaving art into how visitors and residents experience Park City is by playing a defining role in the county’s vibrant and diverse public art collection. “Where most cities and counties have an arts director or manager on staff, neither Park City nor Summit County do and so they contract our organization to fulfill that role,” Jocelyn says. In this capacity, the Arts Council serves as advisor and liaison to the Park City Council for the Park City Art Advisory Board and administrator of the Summit County Public Art Advisory Board, managing the planning, operations and outreach for each group. This includes the execution and oversight of the 1% Public Percent-for-Art Policy, which sets aside one percent of the budget of county capital improvement projects to support new public art installations at Summit County construction or renovation sites. A recently completed 1% project is the Rocky the Moose and Sandy, Milo and River the Sandhill Crane with Colts sculptures at the Jeremy Ranch/Pinebrook Roundabouts.

Finally, the Arts Council also navigates the bigger picture of supporting and presenting visual art in Park City and Summit County through planning and advocacy. In February, the organization contracted with the Ohio-based consulting firm, Designing Local, to develop a new arts and culture masterplan. Work that Arts Council and Designing Local have engaging in since then include a resident survey, in-person thought exchange workshops and an examination of other mountain towns—including Jackson, Wyoming; Aspen and Boulder, Colorado; and Flagstaff, Arizona—to discover how those areas are leveraging and integrating the arts into their respective communities.

Adopted in 2018, Project ABC (Art, Beauty and Culture) was the first arts and culture master plan spearheaded by the Arts Council, and was an effort, Jocelyn said, focused on bringing all the county’s different arts organizations together under one umbrella. And while she affirmed that much of Project ABC remains relevant to what the Arts Council does today, she also said that a lot has happened and changed in Summit County since Project ABC was written. “We’ve gone through some pretty major events, like the pandemic, and the priorities of Summit County are rapidly changing,” she said. “As the Art Council’s leader, I felt that I needed a plan with more specific boxes to check.”

One of the box-checking strategies the Arts Council is already engaging in is interacting closely with potential implementation partners to “take action and ownership in things the community has asked for, like more cultural facilities,” Jocelyn says. Look for the final version of the Arts Council of Park City & Summit County to be adopted by Summit County sometime later this fall.