GetSmART!: Country Living with Artist Success

Make your community an arts destination while taking your own work worldwide.
Unlock the secrets of living in the country while succeeding as an artist! Discover your community and ways to bring the arts world into rural spaces.
Artists who choose to live in rural areas often face isolation and feelings of being siloed, but opportunities abound for small-town and county-living artists in Arkansas. Learn to capitalize on affordable studio space and creative placemaking while bringing your art to the national stage. Find collaborations and ways to use tourism in the arts.
Join professional artist Jeri Hillis to get a look at how artists in small towns and rural areas can benefit from where they are while building community, connecting with markets and building revenue for individuals and their communities.
Topics include:
Pros and cons of country living as a visual artist
Overcoming isolation and building community
Getting out of your comfort zone, e.g. workshops, outside galleries and competitions
Getting into larger markets/connecting your arts community to metro areas/region
How collaboration with a nonprofit or business can help you succeed
This event is free and includes refreshments. Registration is required because space is limited. The Arkansas Arts Council has teamed with the Mena Art Gallery to make this workshop possible.
This event is free, but registration is required.
About our Facilitator
Jeri Hillis is a professional working artist and teaching artist, working in multiple mediums. Part of the Hot Springs arts community for 20 years, Jeri was the 2022 Artist-in-Residence for the Hot Springs National Park Service. She received her BA from Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts, and continued printmaking studies at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Hillis has been a Teaching Artist-in-Education with the Arkansas Arts Council for 10 years and works with Arkansas Learning Through the Arts presenting pottery and visual art residencies throughout the Hot Springs School District and Central Arkansas. She regularly teaches pottery classes at National Park College Continuing Education, Adult Wheel Throwing pottery and hand building with Youth and Teens as well as some visual arts classes at Emergent Arts. Hillis was selected for the 2010 Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock and exhibited her architectural paintings at the Historic Arkansas Museum’s Trinity Gallery in 2009. Recently Hillis became an adjunct professor at National Park College teaching Painting I and 3D Design. Hillis is represented by Justus Fine Art Gallery in Hot Springs where she has exhibited her paintings and mixed media artworks since 2018. She displays her ceramics at The Collective Arts Gallery, Hot Springs.