Cabot Gets Grant To Bring Murals To Downtown Beverly

From The Cabot: The Cabot is pleased to announce that it has just received an Essex County Community Foundation Grant of $16,500 for "Transforming The Cabot With Murals," a collaboration with Beyond Walls to install murals to enhance visibility of The Cabot and downtown Beverly as a cultural destination.

Essex County Community Foundation, in partnership with the Barr Foundation, has awarded grants to 11 creative partnerships with plans to serve Essex County communities through public art and creative place-making projects. The Cabot was selected out of an impressive pool of over 40 applicants from cities and towns all over Essex County.

The grants, which total $300,000 and will fund arts and culture projects from Lynn to Newburyport, are part of ECCF's Creative County Initiative (CCI), a groundbreaking collaboration with Barr designed to elevate the region's arts and culture sector and support creative expression and our local creative economy.

We were so very pleased with the number and quality of applications for our first-ever round of collaborative arts funding," said Beth Francis, ECCF's president and CEO. "These applications demonstrate the need and desire for artists, nonprofits and community leaders to engage and connect through the transformative power of arts and culture."

"We are so fortunate to be working with the Barr Foundation to fulfill this need in our cities and towns, where arts and culture define such a large part of who we are," she added.

ECCF is part of a cohort of five Massachusetts community foundations working with Barr as part of their Creative Commonwealth Initiative, developed to leverage the unique potential of community foundations to strengthen arts and creativity across the state and help the creative sector become more sustainable, equitable and accessible.

"We want artists and arts and cultural organizations to know their contributions to our cities and towns are so vital to the health and well-being of Essex County," said Karen Ristuben, Program Director for CCI, currently a two-year pilot project. "And because there is a collaborative requirement for these grants, we're also sending the message that supporting and sustaining arts and culture is really up to all of us, community and business leaders, municipalities, artists and nonprofit organizations."

"We envision the Cabot Mural project to be a highly visible and community oriented project that will not only help beautify the exterior walls of the theater, but will also bring together local artists, government, developers, and other important community stakeholders to the table to discuss public art and it's impact, and to solidify The Cabot's role as an anchor of Beverly's burgeoning Arts District," said Casey Soward, Executive Director of The Cabot. "In order to make this process as inclusive as possible, we will be forming a Public Art Advisory Committee to help inform the scope and impact of our work."

What The Cabot Plans To Do:

The Cabot will enlist the artistic and community outreach expertise of Beyond Walls (a non-profit from Lynn, MA), materials from Dawson's True Value Hardware, support from the City of Beverly and a diverse committee of community members to create large-scale murals on The Cabot's exterior walls.

As a highly visible entryway into the Beverly Arts District, The Cabot is uniquely poised to feature public art; which will hopefully inspire additional art throughout the city and beyond.

In the fall of 2018, The Cabot will assemble a committee of about 12 key stakeholders who will guide the creative process. In early 2019, once a cohesive vision for the project is clear, Beyond Walls will put out a "Call to Artists." They will convey the scope of work to world-class, local and global artists to determine an ideal fit for the project.

Over the course of two weeks at the end of July 2019, the selected artists will create the murals and then The Cabot will host viewing events, some in conjunction with Beverly Main Streets. These will include viewing events, a ribbon-cutting upon completion of the mural installation, a meet and greet reception with the artists; all leveraged by the visibility of The Cabot as a premier performing arts destination on the North Shore of Boston.

The Cabot, a 501C3 organization and officially named The Cabot Performing Arts Center, is located at 286 Cabot Street in the heart of downtown Beverly, Massachusetts. The beautiful jazz-age theatre is in the process of being fully restored even while presenting five-star live music, comedy, magic, acrobats, films and more.

Image via Eric Antoniou