The first meeting of the North County Arts Network created plenty of noise: walking into the Arts Building at Cal State San Marcos where the guests assembled was deafening.
Arts administrators from various North County cities attended the meeting Thursday, as well as the directors of the Lux Art Institute in Encinitas, the Oceanside Museum of Art, the California Center for the Arts in Escondido, and the curator of sculptures at the San Diego Botanic Gardens in Encinitas.
Building the North County Arts Network will strengthen creativity and the arts, which are vital for a vibrant economy, Craig Watson, director of the California Arts Council.
“Boeing Corporation makes a point of looking for engineers who show somewhere in their resume an interest in music, dance, theater, the visual arts, because they‘ve found that when they hire engineers with that background, they’re much more likely to be productive and innovative,” Watson said.
Jacquelyn Kilpatrick is founding director of Cal State San Marcos’ School of Arts, which launched last summer.
She moved from Hawaii to lead the new school, and she wants CSUSM to become a hub for the arts and creativity in North County.
Supervisor Bill Horn and Oceanside City Councilman Jerry Kern were among the crowd.
“I give money to most of these organizations individually,” Horn said, though he did not commit to contributing to the North County Arts Network from his discretionary funds.
“The Oceanside Museum of Art has to become a regional art museum to survive,” Kern said.
Daniel Foster, director of the Oceanside Museum of Art, has been a prime mover of the networking initiative.
“There’s 1.3 million population in North County that historically gets in their car, fights traffic and goes south to find their cultural experiences, “ he said. “But we have phenomenal opportunities in the neighborhoods that the population lives in that they don’t know about - so how are we going to connect audiences?”
Foster said networking will generate creative synergy, and joint marketing will help non-profits that have limited resources to grow.
