2011 Recipients

Achievement
For an individual or organization whose creative achievements have uniquely enriched life in Massachusetts.

Williamstown Theatre Festival
For over half a century, the Williamstown Theatre Festival has been a leading force in the American theatre, providing a catalytic environment in which the nation’s best established and emerging theatre artists develop, practice, and refine their craft in collaboration with a loyal and sophisticated audience.

Williamstown Theatre Festival is widely regarded as the premiere training ground for America's best emerging theatre artists, drawn from the nation's top undergraduate and graduate theatre programs. Students accepted into its highly-selective programs are immersed in a potentially career-launching experience by having the opportunity to work alongside renowned professional artists. Over the years, 57 Emmy Award winners, 23 Academy Award winners, and more than 115 Tony Award winners – many of whom started their careers as Williamstown Theatre Festival apprentices – have graced the Williamstown stages in various capacities.

While Williamstown Theatre Festival is perhaps best known for its bold, innovative productions of the greatest works in the theatrical canon, it is also one of the nation's most dynamic incubators for new plays. With at least three fully produced world premieres each season, works developed in Williamstown frequently have extended lives beyond the Festival. Throughout its history, the Festival has seen nine of its productions move to Broadway, 31 to off-Broadway theaters, one to PBS, one to HBO, and countless others to regional theaters around the nation.

The Festival is deeply committed to playing a lead role in the cultural life of the Berkshires. In addition to the full festival season, Williamstown Theatre Festival offers family-centered programming, including the annual Free Theatre production, to introduce new, and younger, audiences to live theatre. The Festival is also the proud home of the Greylock Theatre Project, a celebrated arts mentoring program for underserved and materially disadvantaged children from North Adams.

Williamstown Theatre Festival respects its position as an important economic engine for Williamstown and the Northern Berkshire region. While Williams College generates significant economic activity during the school year, summer activity created by the Festival is crucial for the financial health of local restaurants, hotels, and retail. They create jobs, both directly at the theater and in the surrounding community. Furthermore, over 60 percent of the earned and contributed revenue generated by Williamstown Theatre Festival comes from sources outside the Commonwealth, much of which is then reinvested in Berkshire County.

Creative Community
For a city, town, or community-based organization that has demonstrated the central role of arts and culture in building healthier, more vital, more livable communities.

Team Haverhill
Launched in August 2005, Team Haverhill is an independent volunteer group dedicated to making Haverhill a better place to live, learn, work, and play. Its unique role in Haverhill's life is defined by a distinctive mix of strategies—fostering civic dialogue, organizing hands-on projects, and creating a more informed public through advocacy.

Team Haverhill has sponsored the creation and installation of 24 murals with local historic and cultural themes, including a technologically innovative mural banner in the downtown arts district entitled "Connecting the Community through the Arts." The group has also led innovative arts festivals, including the 2009 "Soles of Haverhill Shoe-la-Bration," which generated community-wide support, participation, and pride. Fourteen giant fiberglass shoe sculptures celebrated Haverhill's past as the premier supplier of ladies fine footwear, while showcasing the city as a place of enormous creative energy and artistic diversity. This unique festival is slated to roll out again in 2012. Children and schools have featured prominently in the Mural Project and Soles of Haverhill: Team Haverhill has partnered with the Boys and Girls Club, YWCA, Whittier Vo-Tech, Haverhill High School's Access Arts program, Girls Inc. and the Discovery Club to involve children and young people in the creation of public art works and exhibits.

Last year Team Haverhill took the initiative in planning a major new river-oriented summer festival called River Ruckus. Residents and business said the scale and quality of this event far exceeded any festival in memory, and bucked economic trends by garnering a record-breaking level of financial support from a broad base of contributors. Planning has begun for the 2011 River Ruckus, with ambitious new goals for promotion and attendance.

Team Haverhill's results stem largely from its commitment to community dialogue and engagement. This network of dedicated citizens places high priority on creating hospitable spaces where stakeholders encounter each other as neighbors, discover common aspirations, and frame realistic goals to accomplish together.

Turners Falls RiverCulture Project
RiverCulture formed in 2006 when artists, organizations, business leaders and town officials came together to create programming around Turners Falls' diverse cultural offerings, scenic beauty, ecological and historical integrity. The partnership believes arts and culture significantly enhance quality of life and are vital components of a healthy community. RiverCulture works to cultivate creative endeavors to engender pride and a strong sense of place in the 19th century mill village of Turners Falls.

RiverCulture started with a marketing and branding program for the village that included a central website of cultural offerings, attractions brochures, walking tour booklets, and public artworks doubling as bulletin boards throughout town. The project emphasized bringing people back to the downtown with events like the annual Block Party and concerts in Peskeomskut Park. RiverCulture offered fresh perspectives on underutilized or poorly maintained spaces with thought-provoking art installations in downtown parks. And artists repurposed items on hand with the Recycled Fashion Show, which creates new designs from clothes left behind in the laundromat on Third Street.

A 2007 economic impact analysis conducted by UMASS Dartmouth Center for Policy Analysis (CPA) indicated cultural events in Turners Falls brought in 30,000 people and $785,400 into the local economy. A 2009 survey conducted by CPU indicated more than ninety-two percent of respondents report they have a more positive perception of Turners Falls because of RiverCulture. That translated into travel articles and features stories such as the Boston Globe's "Fossils and a funky arts scene share the spotlight in the tiny mill village of Turners Falls." Positive editorials in local papers supplanted police log entries and crime reports with headlines like "Turners Falls is a comeback town... a cause for celebration."

RiverCulture's incremental efforts over the past five years made 2010 a transformational one in positioning Turners Falls as an attractive and receptive place for culture and creativity. Groups and individuals other than RiverCulture began holding major events in the community. The first annual Montague Soapbox Races this summer drew over 1,500 people and the new Franklin County Pumpkin Fest brought an estimated 8,000 participants to the downtown, a number equal to the town's entire population.

Villa Victoria Center for the Arts
A program of Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción (IBA), Villa Victoria Center for the Arts is the largest and most significant Latino Cultural Center in New England. The Center reaches over 20,000 people a year with its mission to preserve, promote and celebrate Latino art and create dynamic cross-cultural collaborations.

Villa Victoria presents the broad diversity of Latino and Latin American cultural expression and using arts and culture as tools for self-transformation and community building. The Center's programming includes:

• New England's longest running Latino performance series, presenting innovative Latino and Latin American music, performances and workshops by outstanding artists.
• La Galería - The first gallery in New England focuses on art created by Latinos and those commenting on the Latin American Diaspora.
• Festival Betances – The foremost and oldest Latino community arts festival in New England offers three days of music, dance, and cultural activities that celebrate Latin American and Puerto Rican culture.
• Special events like the Tito Puente Latin Music Series, free outdoor concerts presented in partnership with Berklee College of Music and the City of Boston.
• Free Community Arts – including arts education programming for teens, free matinees to local elementary school children and weekly music programming for community elders.

Awarded National Endowment for the Arts grants over the past three years; Villa Victoria Center for the Arts has garnered numerous honors from organizations that include: Berklee College of Music, MetLife, Citizens Bank and the Boston Center for the Arts. In 2005, the Center was selected as a National Finalist for LINC/Ford Foundation's Arts in a Changing America program.

Creative Learning
For an individual, school, or cultural organization that has demonstrated the importance of creativity and innovation to student achievement and success

Plimoth Plantation
Plimoth Plantation is a Smithsonian Affiliate Museum committed to inspiring education through powerful and creative means. The museum adheres to the philosophy, "You can't change history... but it can change you."

Always engaging, playful and fun, yet meaningful, innovative and transformative, Plimoth Plantation is a living history museum dedicated to the dramatic story of the Native Wampanoag people and Colonial English Pilgrims of 17th-century Plimoth Colony. Spanning four major sites at two locations, Plimoth Plantation's interactive nature has provided a truly unique, immersion experience that goes beyond a traditional museum venue.

Not only the hearth of the local community and a Massachusetts state treasure, Plimoth Plantation is a world-class living history museum and an international travel destination, welcoming more than 350,000 visitors annually, from at least 80 countries around the world. The multicultural significance of 1600s colonial New England is not only meaningful, but globally applicable to the lives of contemporary Museum-goers, as the Plimoth story puts life into perspective with relevance for guests of all ages; thus creating an important and positive economic impact on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Continuing with creativity and inspiring learning in 2011, Plimoth Plantation will bring a love of Shakespeare to the town of Plymouth and surrounding area with the innovative program: "One Play, One Community: Romeo and Juliet." This exciting new book club-styled series will invite the entire community, young and old, to put Romeo and Juliet on their summer reading list. Partnering with the local library, schools and PAC TV, Plymouth's community access cable television station, Plimoth Plantation will lead the community on a journey of Shakespearean discovery with group readings, live theater events, and a whole host of Romeo and Juliet-inspired learning.

Nancy Barile, Revere High School
Nancy Barile has been teaching English at Revere High School for sixteen years. Seventy-three percent of the students at Revere High School qualify for free or reduced lunch. The school is truly multicultural: 46 languages are spoken, and many students do not speak English as their first language.

In 2006, Nancy sought grant funding that allowed her to launch the school's Culture Club. The Club was designed to provide students with the cultural capital that they lack, so that they could become more successful in today's world, by exploring arts and share culture. RHS students have attended professionally performed ballets and ten operas, area museums, and theatre performances. They designed the front, back, and inside covers of the program for the national performance of "Madama Butterfly," and wrote seven essays about the opera. Students have also attended the American Repertory Theater, and in each case, the dramaturge from the production worked with the students so that they had a unique understanding of the research and development of the plays they witnessed. The Club covers all fees for these events so that students pay nothing to participate.

Nancy is also Advisor to Crossroads, Revere High School's literary magazine, which features unifying themes and broad student participation. It encourages a variety of literary forms, including nonfiction; writing in languages including Serbo-Croatian, Arabic, Italian, Vietnamese, Hindi, and Khmer; lyrics accompanied by musical scores; as well as poems, short stories, and dramatic scripts. Nancy has brought noted author, Michael Patrick MacDonald, to Revere High to speak to her students after they read "All Souls" and "Easter Rising." She works constantly to develop a classroom library that includes complete sets of books — free for her students.

Nancy has published lesson plans on the National Council of Teachers of English website ReadWriteThink for both "Hamlet" and "Death of a Salesman," along with articles on poetry for the Massachusetts Teachers Association and the National Council of Teachers of English.

In 2006 Nancy won the College Board Bob Costas Grant for the Teaching of Writing, and was one of twenty teachers selected nation-wide for the USA TODAY All-USA Teacher Team in 2007.

Cultural Philanthropy
For an individual, corporation, or foundation that has made lasting contributions to the cultural life of Massachusetts through charitable giving.

Theodore H. Cutler Family Charitable Trust
Ted and Joan Cutler have been instrumental in supporting and inspiring the arts in the City of Boston for more than 25 years through their family's charity. They helped lead the revitalization of the theatre district with the renovation and re-opening of the Cutler Majestic Theatre and the Paramount Theatre, both part of Emerson College, where Ted now serves a Chairman Emeritus of the Board and Chair of the Boston Committee for the Arts. In this capacity, he is also part of a team to help the success of the Emerson theaters in the downtown area and has been working diligently to launch a major Boston arts festival.

The Cutlers have served as members of the board and on special committees of many cultural organizations in Boston, including the Boston Lyric Opera, Opera Boston, Boston Ballet, Citi Center for the Performing Arts, Shakespeare on the Commons, A.R.T., the Huntington Theatre Company, and the Berklee School of Music, among a myriad of others. They are recipients of countless awards where their patronage has brought attention to the varied talents that Boston has to offer while expanding audiences to noteworthy performances.

The Cutlers' contributions to Boston's health and well being also reach into civic and medical related concerns. They are credited with helping to build the new Greater Boston Food Bank (located at Ted Cutler Square), bring support to the Grow Clinic at Boston Medical Center, talent and support the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and discovery to research organizations such as the New England Chapter of Crohn's & Colitis, which they founded over 40 years earlier, and Silent Spring Institute.

Ted lives in Boston with his three children and eight grandchildren.

Culture & Healing
Recognizes outstanding service by an individual or cultural organization at the intersection of health care and the arts, humanities, and/or sciences.

Longwood Symphony Orchestra
Founded in 1982, Longwood Symphony Orchestra began as the dream of a few medical students and physicians and has since grown into an orchestra distinctive for its musical dynamism and innovative programming and recognized as a unique model of community engagement.

Drawn primarily from Boston's medical community, the members of Longwood Symphony exemplify both dedication to music and a genuine commitment to community service. In 1991, Longwood Symphony decided to use its performances to raise both funds and awareness for medical causes through its Healing Art of Music program. Since then, Longwood Symphony has collaborated with 37 organizations to raise more than $850,000 to aid Boston's medically underserved.

During the regular concert season, Longwood Symphony performs four concerts in New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall. The orchestra also performs an open-air concert every summer at the DCR Hatch Shell on the Charles River Esplanade.

Recognizing the uniqueness of the orchestra, Artistic Director Jonathan McPhee programs a musical repertoire that is equally distinctive. Nearly every concert features an intriguing musical gem from the 20th century. Over the past ten years, Longwood Symphony has performed three world premieres dedicated to the orchestra and at least one Boston premiere each season.

Recognized for its dual mission of community service and musical performance, Longwood Symphony received the 2007 League of American Orchestras/MetLife Award for Excellence in Community Engagement. The Wall Street Journal, the Catalogue for Philanthropy, and Symphony Magazine have similarly praised Longwood Symphony for both its musical excellence and its commitment to community service.

Leadership
For the leader of a nonprofit cultural organization, school, or community who has shown extraordinary commitment to serving the public.

Katherine Sloan, Massachusetts College of Art and Design
Dr. Katherine "Kay" Sloan has led Massachusetts College of Art and Design to unprecedented growth over the past fifteen years and has fostered the development of its national and international reputation as a leading college for visual arts. Her presidency has proved to be one of the most exciting and prosperous periods in the history of the college. Enrollment is at an all-time high, the endowment has tripled, scholarship dollars are up. Moreover, students have more global learning opportunities available, and the faculty is more diverse.

The New Partnership for MassArt, a pioneering financial and governance model which leverages strengths of both public and private higher education, will probably be remembered as Kay's most important contribution to the college. Yet the most visible signs of her leadership can be seen in the campus itself. During her tenure, MassArt has added a second residence hall and established the Pozen Center for Interrelated Media. And she recently launched the largest fundraising campaign in MassArt's history, a $140 million investment that will continue to transform the college—physically and programmatically.

Perhaps what has meant the most to her personally, however, is ensuring "the education of artists and designers as people who have a sense of social responsibility." Since she first spoke about the "citizen artist" in her inaugural address, Kay has nurtured and promoted a culture of social responsibility. In 2004, she launched the college's Center for Art and Community Partnerships to advance this effort. And she has been actively involved in numerous organizations, including the Boston Arts Academy, which she helped found and continues to serve as chair, and the Colleges of the Fenway, which has opened up vast new learning opportunities for MassArt students and faculty.

Kay has also helped broaden the definition of the creative economy in Greater Boston to include the design industries, which employ an estimated 44,500 people in Massachusetts and contribute to the overall economic and cultural vitality of the region. In 2007, to further her vision, Kay incubated the Design Industry Group of Massachusetts, which brings civic and business leaders together to organize and support design industry clusters through policy efforts, research, and forums. And in 2008, Governor Deval Patrick recognized her leadership by appointing her to the Creative Economy Council, charged with developing a statewide plan to grow the creative economy.

Kay retires from MassArt in summer 2011, having established a legacy of extraordinary leadership, unparalleled vision, and dedication to civic engagement, which has positioned the college for continued success in the coming years.

Nancy Jane Fitzpatrick, Co-chair, Berkshire Creative Economy Council
In January of 2008, entrepreneur, community leader, and philanthropist Nancy Fitzpatrick, became chair of Berkshire Creative, a newly formed economic development and support organization serving the Berkshire County region of Western Massachusetts. Working with a distinctively active board and Director Helena Fruscio, Ms. Fitzpatrick has helped guide Berkshire Creative from a start-up to its current standing as a nimble, dynamic organization at the forefront of the creative economy development field.

Ms. Fitzpatrick is no stranger to community involvement. Her record of service reaches from Boston to the Berkshires and beyond, and includes organizations such as the Berkshire Museum, Berkshire Natural Resources Council, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Hancock Shaker Village, IS183 Art School of the Berkshires, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, Massachusetts Cultural Council, MASS MoCA Foundation, and the Trustees of Reservations. Her philanthropic activity, as both a trustee of the Fitzpatrick family High Meadow Foundation and as a private individual, continues to leave an indelible mark both within and outside the county and the state.

Ms. Fitzpatrick is a second-generation hotelier whose family has owned The Red Lion Inn since 1968. For the last 18 years, she has overseen a hospitality business that includes The Red Lion, The Porches Inn at MASS MoCA, Elm Street Market, and most recently The Wigwam Cabins. The inns have been commended by National Geographic Traveler for their commitment to sustainability, eco-conscious practices and support for the community — activities all stemming from Ms. Fitzpatrick’s insistence that her businesses tread as lightly as possible on the earth while helping sustain their neighbors in Berkshire County. Ms. Fitzpatrick also serves as the Vice Chairman of The Fitzpatrick Companies, parent company of Country Curtains and Housatonic Curtain Company.

Through her role as a respected leader, businesswoman, creative individual and advocate, Ms. Fitzpatrick has brought creativity's role in the vitality of the region to the forefront of economic planning. She has set in place structures to leverage the culturally rich region's existing assets and fostered greater cohesion within the creative community. Thanks to her efforts, groundbreaking avenues of communication and collaboration between the traditional business and creative sectors now exist that will help ensure that the distinctive Berkshire Region will continue to grow, thrive and prosper.

Ms. Fitzpatrick is a graduate of Smith College. She is married to photographer Lincoln Russell, and has a son, Casey Rothstein-Fitzpatrick, and three stepchildren; they are Morgan Russell, Michael Rothstein and Sarah Eustis.

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