Milton Arts Guild celebrates reopening
After being closed for more than a year, Milton Arts Guild members and guests gathered April 30 to celebrate old friends and new beginnings.
The guild kicked off the reopening with its Celebration art exhibit and annual Spring Fling Market.
The Celebration show exhibits works done by guild members during the COVID-19 pandemic. President Sue Dutton said members created different works over Zoom calls, including what she called doodles, where members created a work in an hour, and a three-by-three challenge, where works were created on a three-by-three canvas every day. Dutton said the Zoom doodles involved teachers presenting a new doodle and the students doing their own version.
Besides the show, over the weekend of May 1, the guild held its Spring Fling Market, where members could sell their works.
“We’re just so excited to be open,” Dutton said. “It’s just such a relief to know that we can breathe again. I’m proud of us.”
Dutton said online classes were such a success, the guild actually added members from across the country. She said the organization plans to continue them, now offering online and in-studio classes.
“During the pandemic, we still had to pay rent. And we were closed. So we did online classes, we did online shows and we made the money to keep our place and do what we needed to do to stay viable,” Dutton said. “We’ve stayed very active.”
Milton Arts Guild was founded in 2005 as a collective of 10 local artists and has since expanded to more than 100 members. To accommodate that growth, the guild will be moving into a new facility in July, at 107 Federal St. in the downtown central business area.
“This move is the culmination of years of hard work on the part of our artists/members who have joined forces to celebrate the artistic community in Milton and beyond, and we couldn’t be more enthusiastic about our future,” Dutton said. "Although we have been happy in our Walnut Street gallery, our continuing growth and our goals for the coming years led us to our new home that suits our needs now and will accommodate us into the future.”
As befitting its future home, the guild is ready to step up and do more partnerships with downtown businesses and organizations. The first of those collaborations will be with Milton Historical Society on a retrospective of the 1909 fire that destroyed much of downtown Milton. Paintings from guild artists will re-create scenes from the fire that will be displayed at the historical society. Dutton said after the exhibition ends, the thought is to donate the artwork to the Milton Fire Department.
“We’re just ready to take off and launch, and I think we’re going to be growing more and more and more,” she said.
