2016 ARTYS Nominations Now Open Through Mobile Arts Council

The Mobile Arts Council and Wind Creek Hospitality announced that nominations for the 2016 Artys were open, kicking off the annual awards that celebrate the individuals, groups, and businesses that strengthen Mobile’s cultural community. The Artys have become the city’s signature recognition of its arts scene — an evening devoted to the painters, performers, teachers and patrons who make Mobile’s cultural life what it is.

More categories than ever

This year’s Artys expanded to 11 categories, up from eight the previous year — the largest slate in the awards’ history. Honors included Lifetime Achievement, Patron, Arts Educator, Artistic Innovation, Visual Artist, Performing Artist, Literary Artist, Artistic Design, Business, Organization, and Art Soldier.

The expansion mapped the breadth of what Mobile’s creative community actually is. The artist categories — Visual Artist, Performing Artist, Literary Artist — honor the people whose work audiences see and read. The support categories — Patron, Business, Organization, Art Soldier — honor the funding, hosting and behind-the-scenes labor that make artistic work possible in a mid-sized Southern city, where a working artist’s career often depends on a handful of businesses and committed volunteers.

The additions also recognized forms of creative contribution that older award programs tend to miss. Artistic Innovation carved out room for artists pushing into new media and new formats; Arts Educator put a formal spotlight on the teachers shaping the next generation; Artistic Design acknowledged the commercial and applied creative work that surrounds the fine arts but rarely gets its own trophy. Together, the 11 categories described an ecosystem rather than a roster of individual stars.

How nominations worked

Nominations could be submitted through October 26 via the council’s nomination link, giving Mobile’s arts community a fixed window to put forward the peers, mentors, businesses and organizations they believed deserved the recognition. The open-nomination format is central to what the Artys are: the awards come from the community’s own judgment of itself, not from a panel selecting winners in isolation.

Winners in each category were to be announced at the ceremony and presented with a limited-edition award designed by Susie Bowman, owner of the Kiln Studio and Gallery — a different local artist chosen each year to create a one-of-a-kind piece. The rotating designer tradition makes each year’s trophies collector’s pieces specific to their moment, and it puts another local artist’s work at the center of the event itself.

Bowman’s studio, a fixture of Mobile’s ceramic arts scene, gave the 2017 awards a distinctly handmade character — fitting for trophies meant to honor artistic achievement with artistic work rather than mass-produced statuettes.

The big night

The awards ceremony was scheduled for Friday, January 27, 2017, at 7 p.m. at the Alabama Contemporary Art Center, 301 Conti St. The venue choice placed the ceremony in one of downtown Mobile’s most distinctive cultural spaces — a contemporary art institution in the heart of the city’s historic district, whose galleries gave the evening a backdrop matched to its purpose.

Tickets were on sale to the public, with Mobile Arts Council members eligible for a discounted price. The member discount reinforced the council’s model: an organization sustained by its members, celebrating a community built by its members, with the ceremony priced so that the broader public could join the celebration rather than watch from outside.

Organizers projected the event would be the most memorable Artys to date — and expected it to sell out. With the expanded field of categories, a one-of-a-kind set of artist-made awards, and the energy of a Mobile arts scene that has grown steadily alongside the revitalization of downtown, the January ceremony was positioned as both a celebration and a statement about how far the city’s cultural community had come.

Wind Creek’s role and what sponsorship means

The partnership with Wind Creek Hospitality put the Poarch Band of Creek Indians’ hospitality enterprise — whose properties include gaming, hotel and entertainment destinations across the region — alongside the Mobile Arts Council as a presenter of the awards. Corporate sponsorship of this kind matters in a city of Mobile’s size: grants and ticket sales rarely cover the full cost of running a cultural organization, and a presenting sponsor’s support is what allows an awards program to expand its categories, commission artist-made trophies and stage a ceremony in a downtown venue.

The sponsorship also signaled the direction of Mobile’s broader cultural economy. As downtown revitalization brought residents, restaurants and nightlife back to the city center, businesses with a stake in the city’s vibrancy found the arts community a natural partner — and the Artys became one of the marquee events where that partnership was on display.

The Mobile Arts Council’s place in the scene

The Mobile Arts Council serves as the connective tissue of the city’s cultural community — a designated arts agency that supports and promotes the painters, theaters, dance companies, musicians and festivals that collectively define Mobile’s creative life. Its programs span grants, exhibitions, member services and advocacy, and the Artys are its most public annual moment: the night the community’s own contributions are tallied and celebrated.

An awards program of this kind does quiet work beyond the ceremony. Nominations force the community to articulate who is doing valuable work; the event publicizes artists and organizations to audiences who may not know them; and the annual cycle builds a running record of the city’s cultural history — who mattered, and when. The expansion from eight categories to eleven in the 2016 cycle reflected both the community’s growth and the council’s effort to make the awards answer to it.

The category structure told that story in miniature. Lifetime Achievement honored careers that shaped the city’s cultural memory. Arts Educator recognized the classroom work that sustains everything else. Art Soldier — perhaps the most Mobile-specific of the honors — celebrated the unheralded volunteers whose behind-the-scenes persistence keeps small arts organizations alive. No single trophy in the set celebrated a bigger name than another; the design made the point that a cultural community is a network, not a headline.

Downtown as the setting

The Alabama Contemporary Art Center at 301 Conti St. anchored the evening in the district where Mobile’s cultural revival has been most visible. The institution — known for exhibitions of contemporary work that draw from across the region and beyond — occupies a significant downtown building and has been a driver of the gallery-and-performance scene that grew up around the city’s core.

Holding the Artys there placed the city’s artists in the middle of their own ecosystem: a contemporary art space hosting an evening that honored visual artists, performers, writers, educators and the patrons who fund them, all blocks from the restaurants, theaters and venues that make up the nightly texture of downtown Mobile. For a January Friday night, the ceremony doubled as a demonstration of the scene it was celebrating.

With nominations open through October 26, the council’s message to Mobile’s arts community was straightforward: the 2017 Artys would be what the community made of them — as many nominations as its members cared to submit, eleven categories spanning the full range of creative work, and an expected sell-out crowd on hand when the winners’ names were read at 7 p.m. on January 27.

The Kiln Studio and the artist-made trophy tradition

Choosing Susie Bowman to design the 2017 awards continued a tradition that gives the Artys their distinctive character: each year’s trophies are one-of-a-kind works commissioned from a different local artist, so the award for artistic achievement is itself a piece of local art. Bowman’s Kiln Studio and Gallery has been part of Mobile’s ceramics scene for years, and her limited-edition designs for the winners carried the markings of a working studio — pieces made by hand, in the city, for the people the city was honoring.

The tradition does double duty. It guarantees that each year’s ceremony has a visual identity no other year can repeat, and it adds one more local artist’s name and work to the evening’s program. In a community where visibility is the scarcest resource an artist can have, having your work handed to every winner on the city’s biggest arts night is recognition of its own kind.

What the categories say about a cultural city

Reading the 11 categories as a whole is a lesson in how a mid-sized Southern city actually sustains its arts. Visual Artist, Performing Artist and Literary Artist cover the makers. Artistic Innovation and Artistic Design honor the new and the applied. Lifetime Achievement, Patron, Business, Organization and Art Soldier cover the support structure — the donors, the companies, the institutions and the tireless volunteers.

That structure reflects a truth about cities like Mobile: artistic careers here are rarely built on gallery contracts in New York or studio deals in Los Angeles. They are built locally — on teaching jobs, on commissions from local businesses, on organizations that mount shows and stage performances season after season. An awards program that honors only the artist would flatter a fantasy; one that honors the whole network describes the reality, and the 2016 Artys’ expansion to 11 categories moved decisively in the latter direction.

Arts Educator deserves particular mention in that frame. Every working artist in Mobile passed through a classroom — public school, private studio, university — and the quality of the city’s cultural future is being decided in those rooms right now. Putting the category on the same podium as Lifetime Achievement made the argument explicitly: teaching art is not adjacent to the creative community; it is its foundation.

From October nominations to a January celebration

The calendar gave the community three months to make the event its own. Nominations through October 26 fed the deliberations; ticket sales — public, with member discounts — filled the room; and the weeks between were the quiet work of the council and its sponsors preparing an evening that organizers believed would be the most memorable Artys to date, with a sell-out expected.

For the nominees, the months in between carried their own value. A nomination is a public statement that peers noticed the work — that someone in Mobile’s arts community considered an artist, teacher, patron, business or volunteer worth putting forward. In a field where that kind of affirmation is rare and precious, the Artys’ nomination list is itself a snapshot of the city’s cultural health.

And for Mobile as a whole, the January 27 ceremony at the Alabama Contemporary Art Center marked another installment in the story the city has been telling about itself for a decade: that downtown’s revival and its arts scene are the same story, that the creative community belongs at the center of the city’s identity, and that an evening celebrating it — with a sold-out room and artist-made trophies in hand — is exactly the kind of night Mobile’s cultural community has earned.