Arts and Culture > Students and the Arts

A passage on the Park City Jazz Foundation's web site aptly describes the need for Arts in education:

"It is as important to education as English, mathematics, history, science, and foreign language. It has been proven that music education enhances higher brain function, improves reading and math performance, develops quick and decisive thinking, builds teamwork skills, enhances cooperation, and prepares children for the future."

Thanks to the efforts of the schools and the arts and cultural organizations of Park City and Summit County, our students are offered a wide variety of top-quality programs, classes, scholarships, and opportunities to pursue their interests in arts and culture.

VISUAL ARTS

Arts Kids

The Arts Kids after-school program reaches hundreds of 8-to-15 year-old, at-risk children each year, at no cost to their families. The unique small-group setting, held every week in local schools, connects professional artists from different modes of art with kids from diverse backgrounds. Together they learn, express, and create, across all boundaries. In the process, the students discover talents and develop habits to build their confidence and apply to all areas of school and life.

Artspark

ARTSPARK is a comprehensive after-school art program for students in grades 3 through 5. Designed as a mini-art school, ARTSPARK offers a curriculum that incorporates the Utah State art education standards. Our state certified, local art educators, Susan Parker and Anita Slevin, are dedicated to providing this sequential elementary art program to the children of Park City, while also addressing the needs of working parents and our community. As experienced, professional art teachers with over 50 years combined experience, our instructors have the ability and passion to connect with children and make art come alive. Classes meet once per week at a designated elementary school. Tuition is $120 per six-week session and includes all materials. Click here for registration information.

Kimball Art Center

Young Artist’ Academy – A youth organization intended as a bridge program for high school students interested in the arts. This free, year-long program provides opportunities to gain insight into professional artists’ practices and to encourage Summit County youth to build connections within their local arts community. Each Young Artist is required to provide community service hours in the arts.

Classes, Workshops, and Programs – Fee-based classes offered throughout the year in all art disciplines and for all ages. While a fee is required, the Kimball does not turn anyone away who wishes to take a class and is financially unable to pay.

School Programs - Through elementary level art education outreach programs, the Kimball seeks to bring art into the community, providing much needed art education for public and private schools.

Art Education Training and Development for Teachers and Parents – The Kimball provides educational training and art workshops for classroom teachers and for parents teaching art in schools. These workshops provide hands-on experience with art materials and processes and demonstrate how educators can encourage creative growth, problem solving and critical thinking skills through the arts.

Exhibition-Centered Tours, Discussions, and Art Activities – The Kimball provides tours and art-making activities that broaden visitors’ understanding of featured exhibitions, and provide fun and educational experiences for everyone. All public and private schools in the Park City, South Summit and North Summit School districts are invited for a minimum of two times each year for an educational tour and art activity. Teachers bring their classes to the art center for a half-hour, age-appropriate tour of the exhibition, followed by a one-hour, artist-directed art-making activity.

After-School Class Offerings – The Kimball Art Center offers a broad range of classes, for children and adults, including a new category of classes for teens ages 12 to 17. In addition to the exceptional classes offered in specific art disciplines, such as ceramics, life drawings, welding, photography, and jewelry making, the Kimball offers general art education and art appreciation classes.

Wasatch Back Student Art Show - The Kimball Art Center is pleased to present this popular annual show featuring work by young artists in Summit and Wasatch counties. The show is open to all K-12 students residing in Summit and Wasatch counties. There is a minimum $1 entry fee per student.

Studio 6 Store - the only art supply store in Park City and Summit County. Choose from a variety of professional art products at Park City’s only art supply shop. The supply store is located on the lower floor of the Kimball Art Center and stocks a variety of professional brands. Click here for more information.

MUSIC

Mountain Town Music

Mountain Town Music (formerly Mountain Town Stages) initiated their first internship program in 2007. Seven high school and college students worked on all technical aspects of stage and equipment set-up, sounds engineering, and act transitions. Individuals chosen were either already enrolled in, or intended to pursue education in, sound engineering/production.

Park City High School Band Program

Park City High School's nationally-recognized bands, under the director of Chris Taylor, PCHS Director of Bands and Jazz, perform regularly throughout the year at the Eccles Center. The PCHS Jazz Band hosts an annual "Sweetheart Dance" in February to raise funds for the band programs. For a schedule of performances and for opportunities to support the band programs, click the link above.

Park City Jazz Foundation and Festival

Through Park City Jazz Foundation’s comprehensive Jazz Education Program, students are able to develop their music while interacting and studying with world class musicians and teachers. PCJF’s local and regional education programs include:

All-Star Student Combo - performs a benefit concert each year with world-renowned jazz artists at the Eccles Performing Arts Center.
Park City Summer Institute - annual retreat for jazz educators, musicians, students, and industry members from around the world that includes professional development workshops, collegiate and high school academy, jazz fantasy camp, and a series of concerts, lectures and gallery exhibitions open to the public.
Park City Jazz Festival - PCJF’s annual three-day festival brings approximately 12,000 jazz students, aficionados, and musicians to the Deer Valley outdoor amphitheater. During the 2008 festival, over 500 music students participated in free clinics at Ecker Hill Middle School in six separate clinics with world-class jazz musicians. All Summit County students are provided access to clinics on Festival Education Day and given a free ticket to attend the festival.
Scholarships - PCJF provides talent scholarships and scholarships for ethnically diverse musical students.

Park City Music Festival

Throughout the year, and during the summer festival, directors Leslie and Russell Harlow give presentations to Summit County schools which include demonstrations of the clarinet, viola, and chamber music, descriptions and insights into the training and lives, experiences and inspiration of professional classical musicians, description of how works are prepared and rehearsed, movie soundtracks are recorded, and careers are developed. To request a demo presentation please contact Leslie or Russell Harlow through email at chmusic@pcmusicfestival.com. The Harlows are also available for master classes in strings performance, woodwinds performances, and chamber music coaching and master classes.

Opportunities for Students:
Music students admitted free to Music Festival concerts when accompanied by a paying adult (Age 8 and older)

Students are invited to join the Festival email list for future festival events including the popular "Musical Evenings" in homes, the Winter Classics Festival, the Summer Festival and more wonderful classical music events. Send an email to chmusic@pcmusicfestival.com with the words "Subscribe Chamber Music" in the subject line.

Park City Singers

A non-audition choir whose members range in age from their teens to their eighties. Area singers gather to learn and rehearse each week in the Fall and often in the spring seasons. They generally present holiday concerts, community caroling, spring and 4th of July events and are available for singing at events throughout Summit County.

Utah Conservatory Park City

Located at Kimball Junction, the Conservatory offers classes on all instruments, including voice and piano, group lessons, a children's choir, pre-school music program, and summer camps. The Conservatory hosts the Annual Con Brio Music Festival and Competition in March, monthly master classes and community outreach concerts, and music scholarship auditions. Tuition scholarships are awarded for lessons to worthy music students locally and throughout the State of Utah.

Services and classes offered by the Conservatory include: Private Music Lessons for all ages and levels, Music Theory, Music Composition, Performance for the Singer/Actor, Paul Green School of Rock, and Group Voice Lessons for Adults and Kids.

Utah Symphony and Opera

The Utah Symphony and Opera (US&O) is Utah’s largest purveyor of music education, visiting approximately 200,000 students per year, covering every school in Utah over a 3-to-5-year rotation. In 2007, the US&O expanded their education outreach efforts for Summit County residents and students to include their successful OperaTunities Student Dress Rehearsal program at the 2007 Deer Valley Music Festival. OperaTunities gave approximately 1,200 K-12 students and their families the opportunity to experience an inside look at the details of a fully staged, professional opera production by attending the dress rehearsal, free of charge.

PERFORMING ARTS

Egyptian Theatre Company

Each fall and spring the Egyptian Theatre Company’s YouTheatre welcomes nearly a hundred students to its programs, and YouTheatre summer camps served nearly 200 youth. Each class culminates with performance opportunities, and the summer camp features the production of performance such as “High School Musical.” YouTheatre is proud to engage children of all ability, including those with challenges and disabilities. No interested child has been turned away for financial reasons. For more information on the YouTheatre, click on the Egyptian Theatre link above.

Park City High School Performing Arts

Check the Park City High School link for the current schedule of visual arts, performing arts, music, dance, and cultural events.

Park City Performing Arts Foundation

Last season, close to 10,000 students in Summit County experienced the magic of dance, theater, filmmaking and multi-cultural entertainment through PCPAF's free student outreach program. In a one-on-one session with award winning filmmakers, ESL and middle school classes interacted with animation artists from Pixar, and Choral classes were treated to master classes with East Village Opera Company.

The Alan Tucker After-School Technical Theater Program targets at-risk students with an interest in “backstage works” and gives them the opportunity to develop marketable job skills. A recent graduate received a full scholarship to Weber State University as a direct result of this program.

Tickets to Eccles Center performances are available to students for only $5.

FILM

Sundance Institute's Filmmakers in the Classroom Program

During the Film Festival
Each year, Sundance partners with the Park City Performing Arts Foundation to bring documentary filmmakers into classrooms to engage students in conversation about the art of filmmaking, storytelling, animation, and ways for students to make a career for themselves in filmmaking. Sixteen filmmakers visited with over 1,000 students during four days of the film festival in January 2009. Participating classes have included Film Studies, AP Lit, Honors English, Ceramics, Spanish, and Multi-Media Graphics.

Year Round
Sundance Institute brings filmmakers in the first Wednesday of each month for its year-round Film Series. These filmmakers are available for student discussions the first Thursday of each month. Contact Sundance for more information about exact dates and filmmaker names and topics.

Park City Film Series

Provides student filmmakers with a forum to display their work. PCFS holds its New Reel Student Filmmaker Festival in May of each year at which approximately 20 student films are screened before more than 150 guests. more than $1,300 in scholarships were awarded to the top three filmmakers last year.

HISTORY AND MUSEUMS

Alf Engen Ski Museum

The educational component of the Alf Engen Ski Museum relates directly to Utah’s fourth-grade core curriculum and include social studies, history, language arts and science. It is the only regional ski museum in the United States that has an educational component. Through exciting, substantive learning activities, students from Summit County and across the Salt Lake Valley experience the wonder of sport and science at the museum. More than 6,600 students, teachers and parents have participated in the museum’s educational field trip program since its inception in 2002. The program has become so popular that teachers are calling while on their vacations to book a visit for their students. To find out more about this program, click on the museum’s link above.

Park City Museum

Education programs include:
- Providing educational curriculum to all Summit County 2nd grade students and teachers including lesson plans and traveling trunks; science curriculum (chemical and physical reactions during the mining, milling, smelting process) for all 8th grade students and science teachers, and museum tours for all Summit County students
- Living history events: “Meet the Ghosts of Park City’s Past,” and “Halloween at the Glenwood”
- Bi-monthly after-school program and weekly summer camp program for children in four affordable housing apartment complexes
- International Baccalaureate community service opportunities for all 6th through 9th grade students at Ecker Hill Middle School and Treasure Mountain International School

Currently developing new programs for re-opening:
1) Teacher Open-House will provide Summit County teachers with a preview of new exhibits and teaching materials, FREE Educator Museum membership;
2) Family Backpacks will provide families and multi-generational learning groups with an interactive tool to explore the new exhibits;
3) Podcasting program will add more detailed information about Park City history;
4) Changing exhibits will include close partnership with local schools

The new Museum will reopen on October 17th!

Summit County Museum

In addition to the wonderful exhibits at the museum, the Summit County Historical Society has produced a book and CD which portrays the history of Summit County for use in Summit County elementary schools, as well as teacher training materials.

SCHOLARSHIPS

Park City Summit County Arts Council Scholarship
Annual scholarships to graduating seniors from Park City, North Summit and South Summit High Schools interested in continuing their studies in visual or performing arts at the college level.

Judy Taylor Memorial Scholarship
Annual scholarship in memory of local artist Judy Taylor. Co-sponsored by the Park City Summit County Arts Council and the Park City Professional Artists Association for a visual arts student graduating from Park City High School.

Park City Jazz Foundation
Talent scholarships and scholarships for ethnically diverse musical students.

Sundance Scholarship
For seniors graduating from Park City High School who are interested in studying the performing arts.

Bill Hunkey Music Scholarship
Annual scholarship in memory of music teacher Bill Hunkey for a student graduating from Park City High School who is interested in studying music.

William Kranstover Scholarship
For visual art students graduating from Park City High School.

Contact your school to find out more about these and other scholarships available.

Photo by Stephen Pace