Jenny Shultz-Thomas, the new director of The ArtsCenter, joined 97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck and spoke about its impending relocation and plans for the future. This is an edited transcript of their interview. Listen to the full interview here.
Aaron Keck: The ArtsCenter is in the middle of a very busy year with an impending move around the corner from its current home on Main Street in Carrboro around to Roberson Street. Simultaneously, they just named a brand-new executive director, Jenny Shultz-Thomas. She’s no stranger to the Triangle, but she is coming over from Colorado where she served as a pastor most recently. She took over on July 11, and Jenny Shultz-Thomas joins us here now in the studio. Thank you so much for being with us today. Good morning.
Jenny Shultz-Thomas: Hi. Thank you, Aaron. What a privilege to be back in this area to speak with you, looking forward to the future of The ArtsCenter and getting to know our community through a different lens.
Keck: You’re in week three [on the job.] How’s it been going? What have the first couple of weeks been like?
Shultz-Thomas: Well as you can expect, it’s sort of jumping right into this exciting opportunity. We’re about to break ground on the final location for The ArtsCenter. Leaning into the history and the community, getting to know folks, it’s one day at a time, but there’s so much excitement around remaining in downtown Carrboro. We’re preserving our history while looking for new opportunities to create more community engagement. There are a lot of meetings, a lot of listening and looking at plans and pulling permits. So we are jazzed and I’m excited to be here.
Keck: For folks who don’t know, tell us about yourself. What’s your background?
Shultz-Thomas: I’m back in the Triangle — I was here 10 years before my wife and I moved to Colorado. Both of our kids were born here. My wife is a teacher — DPS all the way! My kids are seven and nine. So moving back home closer to Grandma was on my radar to have a date night maybe once or twice. I’ve been a faith leader since I was 16 years old. I’ve worked with corporate, kind of dabbled here and there, but for me right now, the arts and faith communities are diverging in my dissertation research. I am in my third year getting my [Doctor of Ministry degree] at Emory. I’m focusing on maker culture: how community groups and organizations can learn a lot about makers, and how we bring sort of this energy to synthesize around creating and making the future that we want and creating equal access for opportunities. I think the arts are the most obvious place to do that.
Keck: I think of makers, and I think of people who make things, I think of the maker studios at UNC, where they’ve got the 3D printers and everything, but art making as well, too.
Shultz-Thomas: Oh, for sure. Maker culture is a response to technological access. If you think about the fab lab or MIT, it’s this response to the labor union and the market asking who actually can make and create access to their own future. So you think of maker spaces like stem and technology, but it’s also making craft, its making music, it’s making creative dance. It’s an entrepreneurial avenue to create an identity and shape access to resources. I think The ArtsCenter is not creating anything new. The ArtsCenter in Carrboro are the original makers in the seventies, emerging at this place in time to create access for the development of spirit and creation. But really, I think a community that’s co-creating opportunities for growth and progress is who we are looking to be — this hub of innovative creation and inspiring change at this time. It is exciting.
Keck: I love it. You’ve clearly got a very well-formed vision for what you want The ArtsCenter to be. What are folks going to see at The ArtsCenter out of this?
Shultz-Thomas: Oh, [it’s] exciting. So, we are renovating that old UNC building that is right downtown. It gives us more space for classes. If you know The ArtsCenter, you know ceramics and dance and theater and music are the heart of what makes The ArtsCenter vibrant. But we’re looking to take this partnership, hopefully with UNC and their maker spaces, and put it into the hands of our children, our youth, and those on the margins who maybe don’t have access to these kinds of tools. Maybe it creates an opportunity for a career path, right? It’s sort of trade school — back to “if you can make it and invent it, you can be it.” It’s also going to give us this really amazing black box theater opportunity to reengage our theater community. We’ll have versatile spaces. So the theater will also serve as a dance studio and anything you can imagine. With versatile seating and 120-some capacity you can dance, you can do aerial, there’s so much opportunity to create and to make something new.
Early designs for the interior of The ArtsCenter’s new home, which is 400 Roberson Street. (Photo via David Gange Architecture/The ArtsCenter.)
Keck: I love black box spaces. Just for that reason, you can do anything at all.
Shultz-Thomas: You can do anything. The real niche that The ArtsCenter has always had is this incubator for a small intimate environment. That then becomes something new and big. Well, now the coolest thing in town is black box. It gives everybody access to do what they want, but it also provides that niche for us. We’re not DPAC. We’re a different venue for something really special and unique. So please come out and see us. We are about to break ground on this renovation in the middle of a capital campaign already 75% of the way there. So we’re looking to broaden our patron base. Maybe you’ve dabbled at The ArtsCenter, you’ve been to a class or camp, or your kids have. Now is the opportunity to reinvest and reimagine how we can all come together as a community and support The ArtsCenter.
Keck: What’s the timeframe for the new move?
Shultz-Thomas: In the next couple of weeks we’ll be in there breaking ground and hopefully by April or May we will be fully up and running. We’re hoping even earlier we can get in there and at least start the administration and our staff to get things up and running.
Keck: A little bit of a random question just about you. You’re coming out of the church background. You were a pastor in Colorado. You mentioned you’ve been in the church world for a long time. How do you bring that into this position?
Shultz-Thomas: I’ve been a pastor in the United Church of Christ, you know, for a long time. I served in Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Colorado. Faith communities are all about organizing to make progress. Accessing either spiritual direction or accessing community building. Basically, I’ve run a nonprofit organization for many, many years and been co-creating a community — bringing people together who have similar interests and passions, and then partnering with local organizations to benefit each other’s outcomes. That’s the same kind of work that I’ve been doing. So bringing the heart and soul of a people to make manifest what they see and want for future generations, that’s the heart of both faith communities and the artist world. So I’m excited to bring that experience to The ArtsCenter.
Keck: And then finally, we’ve been talking about the future vision for The ArtsCenter with the new move. What’s coming up in the next couple of weeks and months that folks should know about?
Shultz-Thomas: Friday, August 12th in the evening from six to eight, there will be a meet and greet to hear about our new home [during the 2nd Friday ArtWalk]. So we’ll have information, casual conversation, and discuss how we’ll transition from a 1970s community of amazing makers and how we together will kind of walk our way to a new location. So stop by and see us. We have lots to share with our community, but really just pop in and say hi. I’d love to have conversations with anyone who’s willing and available.
Keck: Jenny Shultz-Thomas, thank you so much for being with us today.
Shultz-Thomas: Thanks, Aaron.
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