ArtsLIVE in Ventura County

Michael Arndt
Art …plays. Growing up on a small farm in rural Minnesota in the 1950s, my exposure to formal art was limited. Miss Weseloh, my only teacher for the seven years I spent in the District 54 one-room schoolhouse, helped me make finger-paint and construction-paper creations that decorated the classroom. Each day, we started school by singing…
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Bill Benson
Art … liberates. Back in 1967, I was a seventh-grader at a junior high, just outside Indianapolis. Although I was a relatively good kid and decent student, I was by no means a candidate for the dean’s list. All students were required to spend 25 minutes in homeroom each day. Most of the time, there was little to do except find ways to get in trouble…
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Barbara Hirsch
Art … heals. I was fortunate to live in Manhattan for four years in the 1960s, while raising three small children. During the middle of the day, I often was able to slip away and, as a special gift to myself, visit many art galleries. New York is a unique city with hundreds of galleries and museums are minutes from where one lives…
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Rich Burlingham
Art … ignites. Back in 1999, my wife introduced me to her grandmother, Gertrude Smith, an eighty-something visual artist from a small town deep in the middle of Mississippi. Gertrude, the epitome of Southern belle charm, had spent her life in the countryside raising four kids, working hard and being the dutiful wife who catered to her husband’s needs…
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Mary Galbraith
Art … transforms. When the toys known as Transformers hit the market, boys and a few daring girls were quick to realize the potential for action-filled fun. There is, I believe, a desire among humans – grownups as well as children – to be transformed, to take on a new personality, all in the blink of an eye…
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Ivor Davis
Art … ambushes. I blame the British Army for my love of music. I was conscripted into the Royal Army Medical Corps at 18, when military service was mandatory in my native land. I started as a private and rose to the exalted rank of – private – when I finally, and happily, was demobilized back into the real world of England in the late Fifties…
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Javier Gomez
Art … affirms. All who live, no matter the career they labor in, must poetically express themselves in what gives them satisfaction through dance, music, theater or art ... this will give them the reason to live. To me, art is a way of life that defines the very core of an individual’s every aspect of existence…
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Jackson Wheeler
Art … unites. When I arrived in Southern California in 1975, my art experiences had been limited to the color plates in the family Bible, the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina and house sitting for a professor/mentor Carolyn Kizer who owned paintings and sculpture by some of the great artists of the Pacific Northwest…
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Maggie Kildee
Art … surprises. One day, when I was in the second or third grade, I was skating in those clamp-on rollerskates (Remember those?) when I spotted my mother sitting on the driveway with something in her lap. When I stopped to get a closer look, I saw she was using colored chalk to create a picture of the gladiolas…
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Hugh Ralston
We are the arts in Ventura County. The Ventura County Community Foundation, in partnership with The James Irvine Foundation’s Communities Advancing the Arts, launched ArtsLIVE in Ventura County, a three-year effort to attract new capital to our local arts organizations, and to strengthen the ways the arts are produced…
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Mary Schwabauer
Art  … invites. A two-headed calf may have influenced the arts in Ventura County more than anyone can say. This unique acquisition of the Museum of Ventura County certainly enhanced the youthful imagination of my siblings and me when our dad, Paul Leavens, took us to view the collection…
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