State Arts Conference
This fall, the Mississippi Arts Commission will host the 2024 State Arts Conference in Jackson, MS. In 2023, we introduced a second day into the conference schedule. Your feedback told us that you loved it! We are back again this year with the added day to allow for more opportunities to connect, collaborate, and network. Whether you are an artist, an arts professional, a board member, a teacher, or a lover of the arts, the State Arts Conference is the place to be.
Dates: Tuesday, October 15, and Wednesday, October 16, 2024
Location: The Westin Jackson – 407 South Congress Street Jackson, MS 39201
Registration Fee
- $45 per person EARLYBIRD pricing for the two-day conference (ends October 1 | meals not included)
- $60 per person for the two-day conference (after October 1 | meals not included)
- $75 per person for the two-day conference + ArtTalk and Dinner on October 15, at 6 p.m. at the Art Garden at the Mississippi Museum of Art (A limited number of tickets are available)
- $30 per person for the ArtTalk and Dinner on October 15, at 6 p.m. at the Art Garden at the Mississippi Museum of Art (A limited number of tickets are available)
Registration for the Tuesday night dinner closes on October 1, 2024.
Early bird pricing for the conference closes on October 1, 2024.
Lunch Option!
There will be a lunch break on Wednesday, October 16, from 11:45 a.m. until 1:15 p.m.
Estelle at The Westin Jackson is offering a Grab-and-Go option for attendees! An assortment of salads, sandwiches, snacks, and beverage options will be available. A kiosk to order and pay for lunches will be located outside Jackson 1 & 2.
Schedule
Tuesday 10/15/2024:
9 a.m. – NOON – Free Pre-Conference: Mapping Pathways to a Teaching Artist Career at The Westin Jackson (space is limited and pre-registration is required)
NOON – Registration
1:00 p.m. – National Folk Festival Presentation
2:45 p.m. – Networking Break Outs at The Westin Jackson, Mississippi Museum of Art, or the Jackson Art Center
4:15 – 5:45 p.m. – Screening of WE START WITH THE THINGS WE FIND in Jackson 1 & 2
6:00 p.m. – ArtTalk Dinner at the Mississippi Museum of Art
8:00 p.m. –ArtWalk at The Westin Jackson
Wednesday 10/16/2024:
8 a.m. – 9 a.m. – Community Foundation for Mississippi – FREE Breakfast at The Westin Jackson (space is limited and pre-registration is required)
9:15 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. – Welcome – David Lewis
9:30 a.m. – 10 a.m. – Keynote – Kate Medley
10 – 10:15 a.m. – Announcements
10:15 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. – ArtBreak 1 – Mandy Jones
10:30 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. – Break Out 1
• Folk Festival Panel
• Creative Aging in the South
• Community Concert Panel
• Creative Writing Workshop
11:45 a.m. – 1:15 p.m. – Lunch on Your Own Around Town
12:45 p.m. – 1:45 p.m. Screening of Eudora in Jackson 1 & 2
1 p.m. – 1:15 p.m. – ArtBreak 2 – John Mohead
1:15 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. – Break Out 2
• Eudora Documentary Panel
• Disability Etiquette
• Public Art as Placemaking
• Squizzits: Throwing Creative Block out the Window
2:30 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. – ArtBreak 3 – DJ Java
2:45 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. – Break Out 3
• Building a Volunteer Community
• Working with Incarcerated Writers
• Public Art Grant Panel
• Sensory Accessibility with KultureCity
All Day Wednesday Events:
Artist Roster Headshots – Jesse Johnson -Pre-registration REQUIRED. Click here to register.
Optional After-Conference Event
4:30 p.m. – 7 p.m.: Conversations Cocktails and Creations ( at Pearl River Glass Studio, Inc. 142 Millsaps Ave. Jackson) – A chance to tour Pearl River Glass Studio Inc. and participate in a mini fused glass workshop. Limited spots are available! To register, email Ashby Norwood at anorwood@prgconserv.org.
All sessions are subject to change.
HOTEL RESERVATIONS
A block of rooms has been reserved at The Westin Jackson at a special events rate of $169 USD per night. Space is limited.
The group rate is good from October 13-18, 2024. The last day to book is October 1, 2024.
Room Block Name: 2024 MS State Arts Conference Westin Room Block.
The Westin Jackson is located at 407 South Congress Street, Jackson, MS 39201.
PARKING
- Parking is available on the street for a fee Monday – Friday 7:30AM – 5:30PM, except Federal Holidays. The parking rate is $1.00 per hour with a time limit of 2 hours, and no re-parking is permitted. SP+ will also enforce safety violations such as Median Parking. Click here for more information on how to pay for street parking in Jackson.
- $18+ 8% tax = daily valet / fenced parking
- $28 + 8%t tax = overnight valet / fenced parking
ACCOMMODATION NEEDS
Please let us know if you require any accommodations to participate. Requests should be submitted at least two weeks before the event. If you have none, select “None.” If your needs change, please contact Victoria Meek, Accessibility Coordinator, at MAC: vmeek@arts.ms.gov or 601-359-6030.
Tuesday, October 15 – Confirmed Panels and Sessions
More sessions and panels will be added as information is provided.
FREE Pre-Conference – Mapping Pathways to a Teaching Artist Career 9 a.m. – Noon
This workshop is designed to guide teaching artists as they chart their journey to becoming in-demand professionals. You’ll navigate, chart, and plot your course through a combination of discussions and hands-on activities. By the end of the workshop, you’ll have the insights to map out your career trajectory and steer toward your professional goals with confidence.
This free pre-conference workshop is for those interested in becoming Teaching Artists or working in the general classroom. It is ideal for both emerging and established teaching artists who want to enhance their professional practice, forge strong partnerships with schools, and explore new opportunities for growth. This workshop is limited to 40 participants and free to those who register in advance.
National Folk Festival – Keynote at 1 p.m.
The National Folk Festival is coming to Jackson in 2025, 2026 and 2027. Join Blaine Waide, executive director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, to hear about the festival, what to expect, and how to get involved.
Blaine Waide, executive director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, has over 20 years of ethnographic experience. He has been a leader of the programming staff since 2013 and executive director since 2023. He previously served as state folklorist of Florida (2011-13), where he directed the Florida Folklife Program. Waide co-edited/co-produced the award-winning expanded reissue of Drop on Down in Florida: Field Recordings of African American Traditional Music 1977-1980. He has an MA in Folklore from UNC Chapel Hill and a BA in English and Classical Studies from the University of Arkansas. At the NCTA, he served as the lead staff member for festival management—and curation of artistic programs—for the National in Greensboro, NC (2015-17) Salisbury, MD (2018-22), and the Richmond Folk Festival. Blaine regularly advises on cultural programming at National Park Service sites throughout the country and moderates festival talk/demonstrations that often feature National Heritage Fellows alongside other festival artists. In 2020, he served as project director for virtual editions of the National and Richmond Folk Festival.
ArtTalk & Dinner
The ArtTalk and dinner will take place on Tuesday, October 15, at 6 p.m. at the Mississippi Museum of Art.
The Pike School of Art (PSA-MS) received a Building Fund for the Arts grant to renovate the former Pike County Youth Detention Center in McComb, converting it into a community art center. When complete, the multi-use center will include three gallery spaces to exhibit art and the cultural heritage of Southwest Mississippi, present work by PSA-MS resident artists, and host community exhibitions and workshops. To bring this work to life, PSA-MS hired New York City-based LOT-EK, a unique and award-winning design studio that makes sustainable and soulful architecture by transforming industrial and infrastructural objects.
Join us for a screening of the documentary WE START WITH THE THINGS WE FIND, which showcases the work that LOT-EK does with sustainable architecture, similar to what they are doing for PSA-MS. After the screening, there will be a panel discussion with the LOT-EK designers Ada Tolla, Giuseppe Lignano, and filmmaker Thomas Piper.
Synopsis of WE START WITH THE THINGS WE FIND: a LOT-EK movie by Thomas Piper
If we pay enough attention to the ordinary, we see the extraordinary. The shipping container is an accidental icon of our modern age: the eight-foot-by-forty-foot corrugated steel box that brings the world to our doorstep. It brings all our hearts’ desires’, available for purchase. And it brings us complicity in the global supply chains, and all the economic, ecological, technological, and political systems that forge those chains, as those great container ships link maker and user, buyer and seller, China and America together across the vast distances of the lawless sea. The design studio LOT-EK is a visionary practice at the intersection of art and architecture, that specializes in upcycling, which is the art and science of repurposing, remaking, rethinking, reimagining. Of using old things in new ways. The shipping container is the thing that has captured their imagination for over a quarter-century: they have remade containers into homes, schools, galleries, libraries, and more. With hundreds of millions of obsolete and unused containers around the world, this is a new and necessary architecture of the future, that repairs and regenerates the unnatural environment that we have inherited from the past. WE START WITH THE THINGS WE FIND is a feature-length documentary of this vision, and of the soulful lifelong partnership of the people, designers Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, behind it.
WE START WITH THE THINGS WE FIND shows us a way to be radically optimistic, creative, and constructive during times that can feel the opposite of all that. Director Thomas Piper’s acclaimed documentary feature Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf showed how wild and unfavored plants could encourage audiences to live more responsibly with nature, and now he looks at living more smartly and sweetly with the effects of industry, infrastructure, and technology. Taking us from spark-filled workshops to a container ship sea voyage over a shimmering sea; and explaining all the prosaic and poetic design thinking behind how LOT-EK brings the container to life, the film shows how all we have can become all we need, how resourceful subsistence can feel like beautiful abundance, and how to keep going when we now know there is no such thing as a fresh start. The film is a humanist essay not only about a new kind of design thinking, but about a new design for life.
Wednesday, October 16 – Confirmed Panels and Sessions
More sessions and panels will be added as information is provided.
Community Foundation for Mississippi – FREE Breakfast
How might your community look different if artists and arts organizations partnered with planners and developers across sectors to re-imagine the public square? Let’s talk about it! The Community Foundation for Mississippi, a place-based funder and host of the Mississippi Rural Placemaking Summit, invites you to breakfast at the Westin to connect you to tools, tactics, and success stories that will inspire and encourage you in your work! Join CFM and others working in the field of Creative Placemaking who are re-imagining public spaces by using the arts to co-create change with the residents of their communities. Bring your best ideas, your imagination, and your appetite to this engaging session on placemaking in Mississippi. Space is limited!
Kate Medley – Keynote
Kate Medley is the author of THANK YOU PLEASE COME AGAIN (2024), a coffee table book of photographs, for which she was a James Beard finalist. The book has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, among others. It was named a Best Book of 2024 by NPR, and won the 2024 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters prize.
Primarily working as a photojournalist covering national news across the American South, Kate’s work focuses on storytelling and environmental portraiture, often exploring issues of social justice and the shifting politics of this region. She regularly contributes to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.
Kate’s roots are in Mississippi, where she has investigated Civil Rights -era cold cases, covered the devastating impacts of Hurricane Katrina, and chased down hot tamales and Koolicles in the Mississippi Delta. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband and two children.
National Folk Festival Panel
Panelists:
Blaine Waide, executive director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts
Amy K. Grossmann, former director of the North Carolina Folk Festival in Greensboro
Lisa Sims, CEO at Venture Richmond, Inc.
Jackson is the new host city for the National Folk Festival! The festival will take place in November of its 3-year stay in Mississippi’s capital city from 2025 to 2027. Since 1923, the National Folk Festival has traveled to different cities across the US, showcasing the best of our nation’s music, art, culture, and traditions. This panel will give insight into what Jackson and Mississippians can expect from this multi-day event. The speakers will share their experiences of hosting the festival in different cities. Lisa Sims will discuss the impact of the folk festival in Richmond, Virginia, and Amy K. Grossmann will discuss the impact of the folk festival in Greensboro, North Carolina. The National Council for the Traditional Arts (NCTA) produces the festival each year, and its director, Blaine Waide, will give an overview of the festival.
Creative Aging in the South
This session will focus on the benefits of providing arts programs that meet Creative Aging standards. Musical performances and hands-on art workshops have improved participants’ cognitive vitality and emotional well-being. These programs provide a meaningful opportunity for musicians and artists to sustain their individual artistic practices and support the local arts community. Come learn how to engage seniors with your arts programs.
Community Concert Panel
Panelists:
Dan Splaingard – Co-Founder, Hush Puppy Music Coop
Scott Barretta – Co-Founder, Hush Puppy Music Coop
Peggy Brown – Talent Coordinator, Blue Monday
Brian Walker – Central Mississippi Blues Society’s Membership Chairman
John Mohead – Creator and Curator, Delta Rising
Sharon Yazowski – President and Chief Executive Officer, Levitt Foundation
Join us for a discussion about bringing communities together through music. We’ll hear from the driving forces behind Greenwood’s Hush Puppy Music Coop, Jackson’s Blue Monday, and Delta Rising. Sharon Yazowksi from the Levitt Foundation will bring her expertise as an advocate and funder for free live music all over the country. Come with your questions and leave with inspiration for activating your community with a concert series.
Creative Writing Workshop
Designed for creatives, this interactive session will propose a writing prompt to participants with time to respond. Participants will be given an opportunity to share and discuss their compositions with the group. Katrina Byrd will facilitate the discussion and provide feedback for those who share their stories. (Paper and writing utensils provided.)
Eudora Documentary – In Conversation
Anthony Thaxton, artist/writer/filmmaker
Scott Naugle, MAC Commissioner and Co-owner of Pass Christian Books/Cat Island Coffeehouse
Following the lunchtime screening of Eudora, filmmaker Anthony Thaxton will join MAC Commissioner Scott Naugle for a conversation about the film, Thaxton’s approach to filmmaking, and his work at the Institute of Southern Storytelling which is located at Mississippi College. Eudora is a recently debuted documentary made by Thaxton that is a “revealing portrait of adventure, daring, humor and love as we meet a writer we only thought we knew.”
Disability Etiquette
This presentation is based on disability etiquette from the personal lens of presenter Cameron Stubbs, who has used a wheelchair for 21 years. It will include interaction tips and advice as well as real-world barrier/challenge solutions. Depending on the audience size, there will be time for Q&A and/or roundtable discussion. It will be fun, lighthearted, and educational!
Public Art as Placemaking
Jennifer Lay, Director of Development for the Mississippi Mainstreet Association, shares ways that communities of all sizes can use art and intentional design techniques to transform public spaces into vibrant, people-centered destinations.
Squizzits: Throwing Creative Block out the Window
Panelists:
Shelby Gorman
Robin Whitfield
Hart Henson
Yolande van Heerden
This session spotlights members of the Squizzits artist group based in the Mississippi Delta. During a period of creative block, Yolande van Heerden started Squizzits to connect with other artists and make art just for fun. This panel explores how making art in a communal setting can reinvigorate an artist’s creative process and be a source of inspiration when feeling stuck.
Building a Volunteer Community
This session will focus on the strategies for building and sustaining an effective volunteer community. Nonprofit arts organizations often rely on the efforts and expertise of volunteers to produce arts programs, raise funds, and serve the community. Whether your organization engages a few select volunteers or hundreds across the year, learn how to utilize volunteers to support your arts programs.
Working with Incarcerated Artists
Panelists:
Dr. Ebony Lumumba, Department Chair & Associate Professor of English at Jackson State University
Carol Andersen, Assistant Director at the Mississippi Humanities Council
Sally Lott McLellan, Artist and Volunteer with the Prison Writes Initiative
Dr. Shannon Anderson, Instructor of Criminal Justice and Sociology at Hinds Community College and instructor at Pearl Correctional Facility
Everyone deserves access to the arts, including the 27,000 Mississippians in prisons, jails, immigration detention, and juvenile justice facilities. Despite the many obstacles in place to reaching these vulnerable populations, arts programming in prisons has led to significant decreases in depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues and dramatic increases in self-respect, self-esteem, and sense of purpose. Additionally, educational opportunities lower rates of recidivism. The panelists discuss their experience working with incarcerated individuals, including the challenges and rewards of offering arts and education opportunities in prisons.
Public Art Grant Panel – Natchez 2
Sharon Yazowski, President and Chief Executive Officer, Levitt Foundation
David Lewis, Executive Director, Mississippi Arts Commission
In the Summer of 2025, the Mississippi Arts Commission will debut an all-new public art grant focused on infusing Mississippi communities with resources to develop community-driven permanent public art installations. During this session, we will hear from MAC Executive Director David Lewis, Levitt Foundation President and CEO Sharon Yazowski, and other partners on the three main components of the grant. Join us to find out more about the inspiration behind and focus of the new grant program as you ready your community to apply in the next year.
Sensory Accessibility with KultureCity
KultureCity is the nation’s leading nonprofit on sensory accessibility and acceptance for those with individual disabilities. This session will explore why and how we support individuals with sensory needs. We will also discuss the certification process, the tools provided, and how to work with various venues and events.
Art Breaks
Mandy Jones
Mandy Jones is a professional harpist with more than 20 years of experience performing all over the Southeast. Mandy has an undergraduate degree in music performance from Louisiana State University and a Master’s degree in music performance with a minor in music education from the University of North Texas. She serves as the adjunct harp teacher at Belhaven University, Germantown High School, and she teaches private lessons, as well. She performs regularly with the First Baptist Church Jackson orchestra and plays for weddings and other events in the tri-county area. Currently, her most demanding role is raising her four-year-old son and three-year-old daughter with her husband, Brian.
John Mohead
John Mohead was born near the banks of the Mississippi River and raised in a cotton field on the outskirts of Clarksdale, MS. He is known for his swampy slide guitar playing and that raspy blue-eyed soul voice that has the ability to connect with his audience on an emotional level. His music taps into the deepest roots of American music. In addition to his guitar skills, Mohead possesses a unique talent for putting stories and experiences into song. His lyrics are heartfelt and reflective, and they draw from the influence of Faulkner, Muddy, and Dylan.
DJ Java – With over 15 years of experience as a mobile, radio, and club DJ, DJ Java knows a lot about the effects of music and uses his knowledge to bring dynamic grooves to listeners worldwide. DJ Java began his career with a turntable, mixer, and Playstation console and has developed his skills to fuse music across genres in a hypnotically rhythmic blend, leaving his listeners wanting more.
Post Conference
4:30 – 7:00 p.m.
Optional Post-Conference Event
Conversations, Cocktails, and Creations
Pearl River Glass Studio, Inc.
142 Millsaps Ave., Jackson
Don’t miss the chance to tour Pearl River Glass Studio Inc. and participate in a mini fused glass workshop. Limited spots are available! To register, email Ashby Norwood at anorwood@prgconserv.org.