feature story / 41 Maplewood’s public spaces. Tunstall ex plains that the goal was engagement: to offer lan guage, pro test, beauty and reflection in places where people n a t u r a l l y gather and pass through. For the coun cil, success of ten looks like residents encountering art in ordinary life, then stopping, thinking and talking to one another. Tunstall recalled people strolling through Me morial Park or along Springfield Avenue, pausing to read the poems, then lingering in conversation. That kind of spontaneous connection, she says, is one of the clearest signs that the arts are doing their job. Thompson agrees. For her, one of the most powerful things about Maplewood’s arts scene is the way it brings local artists and local audiences into direct contact. In many places, artists have to leave town to find an audience. Here, they can make work, share it and find engaged neighbors willing to show up for it. That audience, Thompson says, is one of Ma plewood’s secret weapons. “Artists live here, artists work here and artists share their work with this community,” she said. “I am always amazed at how eager, engaged and sup portive audiences are. They show up, and they’re energized. That doesn’t happen everywhere.” The council meets four to six times a year, usu ally on weekday evenings. Sometimes it spins off subcommittees for specific tasks. It is not funded at all as a standing body. Members are volunteers. Proj ects sometimes require separate fundraising efforts. Much of the council’s work depends on what many community institutions depend on: people with busy lives showing up anyway because they believe the thing matters. And in Maplewood, the thing clearly does matter. The council has also evolved. In its early years, there was a strong emphasis on ensuring the town’s arts spaces – the Woodland, the Burgdorff, and 1978, in particular – were broadly and equitably used by a variety of community artists. That re mains central. But the council’s role has expanded to include projects such as the arts registry on the township website, past arts summits that brought artists together to network and learn and more re cent efforts to gather data on what residents want and need from Maplewood’s cultural life. A current major initiative is a community arts survey designed to better understand residents’ interests, barriers to participation and hopes for the future. Thompson is especially interested in the broader ripple effects: whether people who attend arts events also dine out, shop locally and contribute to the town’s economic vitality in other ways. The arts, she noted, can have a compound ing effect. The survey may help make that impact more visible. If you would like to participate in the survey, scan the QR code at the end of this article 1600 Martine Avenue Scotch Plains, NJ 07076 Scan the QR Code to Explore Summer Camps & Programs Give your child the BEST Another project that MAC initi ated was the Black Poetry Project in 2021. Here Maplewoodians gathered in Memorial Park to read a banner-mounted poem, one of 40 poems by Black poets that were displayed. A work of art being installed in the train station tunnel as part of the Art In Motion Project, 2019.
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