Nurturing the Arts in North Central Louisiana
UpComing Events
Layon Gray’s Kings of Harlem School Show
The North Central Louisiana Arts Council is proud to announce the return of our School Show! Thanks to a grant from Jonesboro State Bank’s Pledge Ten initiative, we are bringing back the award-winning writer and director Layon Gray back to his home state of Louisiana along with his talented cast and crew of professional artists. The best part is this opportunity is completely FREE for your students and educators!
This show is an opportunity for students to witness the talents of professionals who have come from similar backgrounds to themselves. We think it is important for young creatives to meet and hear the stories of successful actors, writers, and musicians who look like them and have lived experiences relevant to their own.
Simultaneously, students will be immersed in the rich culture and history of African Americans who defied the odds and shaped professional sports in our country. This show is a perfect supplement to standard Black History curriculum while giving students and educators the benefit of enjoying a locally historical facility, the Dixie Center for the Arts, which is nearing it’s 100-year anniversary.
This performance is recommended for students in grades 9 through 12. Seats are limited and once spaces fill up registration will close. The deadline to register for classes to attend will be Friday, January 31. Teachers or administrators can reach out to our office via email at info@nclac.org for questions or to register their classes.
For more information about the play, the director, and how to get your 9th-12th grade class registered to attend:
Click Here
Recent Events
The Sound of Earth’s Color
The North Central Louisiana Arts Council is excited to partner with local artist Meredith (Anderson) Edwards for her first solo exhibit hosted at the Creatives At Work Gallery in Downtown Ruston.
After twenty years of practicing her craft, Meredith has put together a collection of thirty digital mosaic landscapes that capture the beauty and essence of our planet. The Sound of Earth’s Color, is the result of many hours dedicated to exploring unique color blending techniques & line work, giving the viewer a new and creative perspective to the world around us.
Meredith says that Ruston, Louisiana has been a huge supporter of her art, from hosting festivals and small local art events. “This community has helped make her childhood dream come to fruition before my eyes,” explains Edwards.
As a big thank you, Meredith has offered a percentage of the silent auction proceeds as donation to the North Central Louisiana Arts Council, to help continue funding our ever-growing local art community.
Invite a friend and join us for a night focused on how we can give back to the arts and appreciate the beautiful corner of the world that we all call home. Meredith asks that we all take a moment out of our day to admire where we are, who we’ve been blessed to be here with, and maybe help even make another dream come true.
The closing reception and silent auction will take place next Saturday, December 14 from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm. We hope to see you there!
Holiday Arts Tour 2024
Area artists will display and sell their works of original, handmade items for the holiday season! Jewelry, wood works, hand-crafted books, artisan soaps, leather goods, recycled textile wearables, calligraphy stationery, ceramics, paintings, photography, and more can be found each year at the Holiday Arts Tour.
We want to give a very special thank you to our local small businesses who will host our artists for this tour: Baldwin Jewelers, Board & Bottle, Brasher Group, Buie’s Photo Shoppe, The Collective, Creative Exchange, Creatives At Work Gallery, Fine Line Supply Co., The Frame Up, Garden Baby, and No. 9 Books & Records.
Summer Art Camps
The North Central Louisiana Arts Council is very happy to have been given the opportunity to bring back our annual Summer Arts Camps this year. Our 2024 camps were supported by a Louisiana Project Grant funded by the Louisiana Division of the Arts.
This year NCLAC partnered with multiple local organizations to make the program accessible to as many children as possible and we were able to grow this year’s program by 60 for a total of 143 participating students. We hosted five weeks of art camps at the Lincoln Parish Library. We were also given the opportunity to partner with the Pinkie Wilkerson Life Development Center Foundation for a bonus week as part of their literacy camp held at Mt. Harmony Baptist Church in June.
We partnered with the Boys & Girls Club of Ruston for two weeks in June. We worked with the 3rd grade students to create custom shirts using bleaching, screen printing, beading and other methods. Students also designed tote bags and were given a tour of the NCLAC Peach Art Exhibit on display in the Library’s Chautauqua Gallery introducing them to various forms of art as well as the works of local artists.
Both sessions of the Boys and Girls Club camps were taught by Bonnie Ferguson, a local artist and educator. She has taught art at a local private school for the last 8 years after earning her Bachelor of Fine Art from LA Tech.
Public registration was made available for three weeks in July. For the first two weeks we worked with students going into 1st through 4th grade. Students were allowed to experiment with multiple materials to create two mixed media pieces as well as learn screen printing and cyanotype printing.
These weeks were taught by Martie Clary. Martie earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Art Education from LA Tech and a Master’s Degree in Gifted Education. She has taught art for 34 years and currently teaches Kindergarten through 8th grade art at AE Phillips.
The final week of public camp students going into 5th and 6th grade worked on mixed media pieces as well as designing tote bags. The final project was inspired by Art on 45, a local art exhibit hosted to help raise funds for various local organizations. Because NCLAC’s 2025 Summer Art Camp was the recipient of the final Art on 45 fundraiser, we wanted to introduce the students to the history of the project and let them create their own.
The last week was taught by Brittney Shambro. Brittney has a bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education with a Pre-K and Kindergarten Certification. She has 8 years of experience teaching Pre-K through 5th grade. She began her third-year teaching art this past Fall at both Cypress Springs and Ruston Elementary.
We want to thank the Northeast Louisiana Arts Council and the Louisiana Division of the Arts for supporting projects like this across Louisiana and allowing us be part of that endeavor. We also want to thank our local partners the Boys & Girls Club of Ruston, Lincoln Parish Library, and Art on 45. Without community partnerships such as these, projects like our Summer Arts Camps would not be possible.
GEEKTogether Art Exhibit
The North Central Louisiana Arts Council hosted our first ever GEEKTogether Art Exhibit! As a collaboration with the Lincoln Parish Library’s first annual GEEKTogether, this exhibit featured works that reflect subjects relevant to the GEEKTogether theme: fandoms, comics, anime/manga, video games, pop culture, etc.
The exhibit was displayed at the Lincoln Parish Library in the Chautauqua Gallery from March 2nd-31st and available for viewing during normal library hours.
The closing reception was on Tuesday, April 2 in the George Byrnside Community Room from 5:30-7pm with awards occurring at 6pm.
We want to thank all of our participating artists. A very special congratulations to all of our winners this year:
Adult 1st Place: Meredith Anderson, Adult 2nd Place: Bonnie Ferguson, Adult 3rd Place: Lindsey Vincent, Teen 1st Place: Arabella Douglas, Teen 2nd Place: Gabriel Seaman, Teen 3rd Place: Evan Sloan, Youth 1st Place: Leytin Thomas, Youth 2nd Place: Korbin Vincent, and Youth 3rd Place: Trinity Williams!
A very special thank you to our 1st place sponsors: A&H Games, Game Exchange, as well as one other donor who wished to remain anonymous.
Written Artistry: A Collaborative Exhibit
Markus Wobisch (Artist) and Kenneth Robbins (Writer)
Written Artistry is a collaborative exhibit that brings together the written works of regional writers with the visual creativity of regional two dimensional artists. Eleven local writers were given two weeks to compose a new, original piece no longer than five hundred words in length. Those works were then turned over to their partner who was challenged to create a visual, two-dimensional rendering, no larger than 20x20 inches, in the same amount of time. The result is a show that beautifully blends the written word with visual representation in a multitude of colors, shapes, textures and styles.
Participating writers for Written Artistry include Christiane Drieling, April Doughty, Tom Faber, Devin Jennings, Khalilah Kersey, Mary Ann Van Osdell, Jesica Ray, Kenneth Robbins, Christopher Seaman, Athena Scott, and Emma Stone. Participating two-dimensional visual artists are Meredith Anderson, James Cobb, Gaelin Craighead, Bonnie Ferguson, Inique Harris, Mary-Evelyn King, Morgan McCullin, Ayah Tamimi, Callan Thornton, Keagan Vaughan, and Markus Wobisch. We want to thank each and every one of these amazing creators for lending their talents and imagination to this project. All of them together made this dream a reality.
Written Artistry is a collaboration between the North Central Louisiana Arts Council and the Ross Lynn Charitable Foundation.
