By Meredith Sell
Step inside the Blackford County Arts Center in downtown Hartford City, and your eyes are immediately drawn up. Art hanging on the white-washed walls surrenders its hold on your attention to the pressed tin ceiling 20 feet overhead, a relic from the late 1800s. The tin tiles curve where they meet the wall, creating an acoustic atmosphere that carries even the quietest whisper.
On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the sounds of various instruments-guitars, violins, pianos, trumpets-echo off the ceiling, filling the former Hallmark storefront on 107 W Washington Street, with the music of beginning students.
It's hard to imagine this space filled with mounds of trash-every surface, from the hardwood floor to the upright piano, seems polished-but trash used to be the building's main occupant. It's only been in the past couple years, following the Center's inception in 2010, that the trash was evicted.
Tisha Trice, current secretary of the Center's Community Board, joined the effort in fall 2010, attending a board meeting at the suggestion of a friend. Tisha, an independent graphic designer and photographer, grew up and currently lives in Hartford City.
"I've always been involved in the arts, and there was never anything for anybody that was into the arts," Tisha said. "If you wanted to be involved in . . . an art-related thing, you had to go to a different town."
The opportunity to bring the arts to Hartford City excited Tish. She started attending every meeting.
When the group secured the current location-the building had been given to Hartford City after the Hallmark store closed-Tish and a variety of other volunteers started spending their Saturdays cleaning out the trash.
"At some point, we had to schedule it because there was so much debris in the buildings that we needed to schedule dumpsters and the garbage truck to show up," Tish said.
Daniel Bowman Jr., assistant professor of English at Taylor, got involved with the project in the middle of the clean up effort. Summer 2011, he and his family moved to Hartford City, buying their first house and deciding to lay down roots.
When he found out about the arts center project, he decided to get involved as a way to know the community.
"The people that I met . . . have become wonderful friends," Daniel said. "And they're people who have the same outlook that I do-that is, let's take what we have and make it as best we can for the next generation."
Those involved with the Center share a common love for beauty.
Retired art teacher, Leslie Newton, was originally involved with the Center's parent organization, Arts Place, as a Staff Visual Arts Curator at the flourishing art center in Portland, Ind. She became part of the Blackford Center when its board approached Arts Place about being the Center's facilitator. Much of her life has revolved around art and she's happy to bring others into the fold.
"When people get involved in the arts, even just as a viewer or a listener in the audience, it does enrich you," Leslie said.
Laura Hicks, the Center's coordinator of MusicWorks, is another Arts Place transplant. Laura grew up taking music lessons at Arts Place and later worked there as a receptionist and intern. When the Blackford Center opened this past January under the legal umbrella of Arts Place, Laura was asked to direct the Center's extension of Arts Place's MusicWorks program.
"Music is such an important part of kids' lives that I think it's important to have a place that they can go, and they can take lessons, and they can explore one-on-one with a teacher or by themselves," Laura said.
The Center provides such a place. MusicWorks is currently its most active and successful art program. Other workshops have made attempts with fledging success. The most successful was a recent Saturday morning poetry workshop which Daniel taught: 17 people participated, significantly overshooting the minimum requirement of six.
On April 27, the Center's first visual arts workshop taught by Angel Mercado, a local artist, will have its first of four sessions. A local doctor built wooden desktop easels to use for this and other visual arts workshops. The easels currently sit in the Center's front window, waiting to be used.
Art has replaced trash as the building's main occupant. It hangs on the walls, rings through the air during music lessons and flows onto the pages of poets-in-training.
"It's amazing to have something like this in such a small community," Laura said. "(Art) is a way to broaden people's horizons and get them to experience new things they wouldn't normally experience. They can-"
"Develop their inside rather than everything that's outside," Leslie cut in.
"Exactly," Laura said.
That's what the Center had to do before it could join the community.
"You can't even picture what this was full of," Leslie said, motioning at the center's clean, open space.
"It was literally filled with garbage," Daniel said. "Piles and piles of garbage all the way to the ceiling."
The tin ceiling, at that point, was hidden by a drop ceiling ten feet from the floor. While they were working, someone removed a tile and saw the tin.
"'I wonder how much work that would take,'" Daniel remembered him saying.
The immediate response was no, definitely not. The money didn't allow it.
"But as we began to take down a few more panels, more people looked at it and said, 'It really wouldn't take that much,'" Daniel said.
Eventually, the trash was cleared out, the entire drop ceiling came down, and the tin was repainted. January 19, the Center had its grand opening, and the about 300 people who came were introduced to the Center, the tin and the new artistic atmosphere on 107 W Washington Street.
"To have a place where music lessons and drawing or painting lessons . . . are available to all age groups-you really can't put any kind of value on it," Tish said. "To us, it's everything."
