In 2022, Mat Bevel Company launched The Santa Cruz Creative Exchange (The Exchange), a multimedia program that connects people to our local creative place-makers who are using their art to create a creative economy sector in Santa Cruz County. This new programmatic area offers regional stakeholder strategic planning, marketing and multimedia art services to other artists and arts group starting with a new Morley Avenue Arts District in Nogales, Arizona.
The first project is a new Morley Avenue Arts District website that benefits any artist and arts organization in Santa Cruz County by providing visibility for their arts and cultural programs. The website is now live at MorleyArts.
A second component of The Exchange program is a series of Morley Avenue Arts District artist digital stories that will add an intimate element to the Morley Arts website and arts district. To start, five artists will be featured whose work is in the performance, visual and culinary arts disciplines. The videos will encourage others to tap into their natural creative genius with a little inspiration from this corner of the world.
For the artist stories, Mat Bevel Company’s Paula Schaper is Executive Director. She says says, “We’ve been looking for an artistically oriented video team to work with for quite some time on this video project and other projects. Verónica Weatherbie and Michael Kaufman have the experience, passion and insight to help us capture powerful artist stories from the U.S.-Mexico border region. These videos will encourage others to tap into their natural creative genius with a little inspiration from this corner of the world.”
Born and raised in Nogales, Verónica is an artist who finds life at the border to be her central source of creative inspiration. Through performance, education and the preservation of culture and history, she brings to light the beauty and value of Nogales’ cultural capital. She attributes her time and work with Borderlands Theater on Barrio Stories Nogales to the enrichment and growth for her relationship to home.
Michael is co-owner of Desert Spotlight, a multi-media brand devoted to connecting, promoting, and archiving the entirety of the Arizona arts and Southwestern culture. Michael has a passion for authentic storytelling and passionate creativity that supports the Southwest’s local communities and cultures.
Mat Bevel Company is collaborating with nine other local non-profit organizations: Santa Cruz Advocates for the Arts, Cultural Committee of Nogales, Nogales Community Development, La Linea Art Studio, Pimeria Alta Historical Society, Tubac Center of the Arts, Border Community Alliance, Border Youth Tennis Exchange and Circles of Peace.
This collaborative program will positively impact the region by contributing to a creative sector of our economy.
The program uses a creative placemaking process to engage community members, artists, arts and culture organizations, community developers and other stakeholders to increase the vibrancy of our place, improve our economy and build capacity through the arts.
For rural regions such as ours, creative placemaking is especially important because rural places like ours have some of the nation’s most beautiful landscapes and cherished heritage. Like other rural areas that have prospered, we’re leveraging our unique place-based creative sector assets to bring visitors to our place, and catalyze economic and workforce development initiatives.
Technology will help us export our art to the world, too. MorleyArts.org will vastly expand artists’ and arts organizations’ customer base by sharing our local flavor of fine art, entertainment and inspiration online with people everywhere.
A federal grant from Santa Cruz County (SCC) American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and an SCC ARPA forgivable loan for small businesses, artists and nonprofits is making this work possible.