The Alabama Contemporary Art Center in downtown Mobile has restructured its staff leadership, elevating Elizabet Elliott to executive director as the nonprofit builds on a year of rapid membership growth and new grant funding. The change took effect Jan. 1 and reshapes several roles across the organization.
Under the new structure, Elliott now serves as executive director and curator, overseeing an expanded leadership team that includes Angie Yankle as director of finance and operations, Allison Skoda as curator of programs, Amanda Solley as curator of education, and Amber Guy as visitor services coordinator. Development responsibilities, previously concentrated with one staff member, will now be shared across the group.
Elliott said the reshuffle grew out of changing priorities among the center’s leadership. Solley, who previously held the executive director role, returned from maternity leave last year wanting to focus her energy on education programming, while Elliott, who had been serving as director of exhibitions and programs, agreed to step into the top position.
The organization launched an internal audit after a year in which its membership grew by an estimated 800 percent, according to Elliott. The center also landed a $100,000 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation in 2019, one of several new resources it hopes to build on going forward.
Elliott said she’s confident in the team now in place at the center. “We have such a great staff right now,” she said. “I’m really lucky to have these people to work with because everyone is really committed to what we’re doing.”
Elliott joined the Alabama Contemporary Art Center in November 2018 after roughly five years at the Mobile Museum of Art, where she held positions including curator of adult education and curator of programs, along with independent contract work.
Elsewhere in Mobile’s arts community, plans are moving forward for a new mid-sized theater development on the city’s west Midtown side that supporters say could fill a long-standing gap in the local venue landscape.
Chris Paragone, founder of Sunnyside Theater and the Azalea City Center for the Arts, is working to develop roughly six acres on the former Graf Dairy property near Dauphin Street and Sage Avenue. The plan would relocate his arts facility from its current location at Midtown Park East, near Dauphin Street and Interstate 65, into a larger, purpose-built theater complex.
Paragone has said the project is meant to address a shortage of mid-sized theatrical venues in Mobile, one he believes affects community theater groups, dance companies, opera and other performing arts organizations. He has spent recent months lining up the technical groundwork needed to bring the proposal before city officials, including site preparation work from a local engineering firm, a geotechnical study, input from a wetlands conservationist, a traffic study and an arborist review to identify environmentally significant trees on the property.
Paragone said he intends to present the project to Mobile’s local building commission before the end of January. His design calls for a black-box theater with a grid lighting system similar to the one at the University of South Alabama, alongside a larger main stage. The primary theater would seat about 500 people, with state-of-the-art lighting and sound and a mid-curtain that can close off part of the space to create a more intimate 250-seat configuration. Combined, the two floors of the facility would total roughly 70,000 square feet.
The local firm Pixallure has been enlisted to lead marketing and a capital campaign for the project, and Paragone said the Ben May Foundation has already committed funding through two separate contributions.
Supporters argue the proposed venue would fill a real need in Mobile’s theater scene. The city’s two largest existing venues, the roughly 2,000-seat Saenger Theatre and the Mobile Civic Center, both carry limitations for modern theatrical productions. The Civic Center has gone without significant maintenance for decades and its long-term future remains uncertain, while the Saenger, though a strong concert venue, was not built with modern theater production in mind. It lacks an orchestra pit, adequate wing space, extensive dressing facilities and a scene shop, and its fly gallery is largely occupied by the symphony’s acoustic shell.
“There was a time back in the ’80s and on into the ’90s that we needed those seats, but we don’t particularly need that much space now. It’s a difficult situation,” said Mobile Opera Executive Director Scott Wright, describing the mismatch between the city’s existing large venues and current demand.
Winning approval from the building commission is only the first hurdle; securing the capital needed to build the facility will be the larger challenge ahead. As a point of comparison, Chipola College in Marianna, Florida, built a 56,000-square-foot performing arts facility in 2012 for $16 million, suggesting a project of similar scope in Mobile could carry a comparable price tag.
Paragone said representatives from Mobile Ballet, Mobile Opera, Mobile Theatre Guild and Dance Without Limits have expressed strong interest in the project, reflecting broader hopes across the local arts community that a new mid-sized venue could benefit multiple organizations at once.