Weehawken Creative Arts

o find your very own community of kindred spirits, wherever your artistic passion lies. Weehawken Creative Arts was founded in 2004 by Susie Opdahl, a creative dynamo who retired to Ouray from Oregon with her husband, Jim, in the late ‘90s. Susie had a vision to actively engage her new community and help it prosper by creating a program that would offer arts education opportunities for locals and visitors alike. With the help of a dedicated board of directors, her idea found fertile ground and soon grew from dream to reality in the form of a new nonprofit organization. At first, Weehawken primarily focused on recruiting adult students from out of the area to Ouray County to take multi-day workshops with well-known instructors. A dozen years or so later, our mission has evolved to focus more actively on serving the needs of our own community. WEE HAVE A PASSION FOR DANCE Now in its fifteenth year, Weehawken Dance is our flagship program, reaching close to 350 kids in Ouray County and beyond. We offer the American Ballet Theatre’s national training curriculum, a breakthrough eight-level program that combines high quality artistic training with the basics of dancer health and child development, under the artistic direction of ABT-certified teacher Natasha Pyeatte. Each dance semester culminates in a spectacular production on the big stage at the Montrose Pavilion, giving all of our dancers a chance to shine. These performances are not to be missed! They reflect Miss Natasha’s talent, vision, and boundless energy as a teacher and choreographer. While the shows may be great, the real magic happens in our studios every day of the dance semester, where our dancers develop compassion, life skills, self-discipline and belonging, in addition to excellent dance technique.

“I’ve never had this kind of individual attention before in my entire life,” said one student who studied ballet intensively in a metropolitan area before moving to Ridgway as a young teen.

“Nat saw something that nobody had ever seen before. I just blossomed. It makes such a big difference when somebody pays individual attention to a dancer. It just transforms them.”

WEE INSPIRE While you may have come to know about Weehawken Creative Arts through our awesome dance program, we touch lives in Ouray County in many other ways. Educational Opportunities: Weehawken offers a tantalizing variety of classes and programs for both kids and adults that include visual arts/fine arts, fiber arts, movement arts like fencing and karate, photography, craftsman arts, creative writing, culinary arts, children’s after-school art classes, horticulture, and a variety of other miscellaneous topics tied to the creative process. Visit www.weehawkenarts.org to learn more about our current offerings!

610 Arts Collective: Weehawken operates a gallery space that features area and national artists in the heart of downtown Ridgway. The space is located at 610 Clinton Street, Ridgway and is also the home to the Weehawken Creative Arts administrative and class registration team. (www.610arts.com). Signature Events: Weehawken also sponsors a variety of art-inspired events that have helped build Ouray County’s reputation as a place where art, artists and art-lovers thrive. • Amateur Sculptor Contest - the contest attracts amateur sculptors as young as 8 from across the Western Slope of Colorado to sculpt two to five pounds of clay into a masterpiece in just two hours; a panel of professional artists determines the winners and awards hefty cash prizes. • Ridgway Rendezvous Arts and Crafts Festival – This annual two-day festival comes to Ridgway’s beautiful Hartwell Park every summer on the second weekend of August, showcasing fine arts and original crafts from over 100 talented vendors from across the country. Art demos, free craft activities, great food and libations and family-friendly live entertainment round out the offerings, making this one of the Western Slope’s most highly anticipated art shows of the season. • Gingerbread Houses – Buckets of candy, oodles of frosting, sticky fingers, heaps of smiles, and a kajillion sugar-coated photo ops. That just about sums up our annual gingerbread house decorating event, offered every December to families in Ridgway and Ouray. We consider it a holiday gift to our community! • Sneffels Fiber Fest – More fun than you can shake a knitting needle at! Weehawken is proud to be the umbrella organization sponsoring this great weekend of fun revolving around the fiber arts that comes to the Ouray County 4-H Event Center each September. WEE BUILD BRIDGES At Weehawken Creative Arts, we are especially proud of our ability build bridges that connect our diverse communities through the arts. Visit one of our dance studios any day of the week, and you will see what we mean! Students come together from Ouray, Ridgway, Montrose, Silverton and beyond, nurturing friendships outside of school confines and performing together in a supportive environment. Likewise, our signature events offer artists and community members the opportunity to gather from across the Western Slope, enlivening our local culture and economy. Our numbers tell the tale: Weehawken offers over 300 classes classes each year, while our special cultural events and dance and theater performances typically enjoy at more than 13,000 participants each year. As such, Weehawken Creative Arts manages to impact nearly every citizen in one way or another each year, whether through a class, special event or performance! At Weehawken, we have always focused more on the programs that we offer than the brick and mortar spaces in which they take place. Through the years, we have offered classes in community centers, church basements, B&Bs, and even people’s private kitchens, living rooms and gardens. We have also supported the economies of both Ridgway and Ouray by renting dedicated classroom and dance studio space in a variety of locations. And we have actively partnered with the Sherbino Theater in Ridgway and Wright Opera House in Ouray, helping breathe life back into those historic venues as we have used them for both classroom space and performance venues. Weehawken is proud to be a founding member of the Alpenglow Arts Alliance, a groundbreaking collaborative of arts organizations in Ouray County, working together to promote each other’s events and opportunities through a unified voice. We also collaborate closely with the Ridgway Creative District in several of that organization’s monthly events. WEE RELY ON YOUR SUPPORT
Over the years, Weehawken has developed a reputation of excellence within our community. Everything we do, we strive to do it well. When you sign up for a Weehawken program or attend a Weehawken event, you know it will be affordable, well-organized and infused with our special brand of passion and creativity. Because of our polished presentation, it is easy to assume that we are a well-endowed organization. Actually, we operate on a modest budget that relies largely on individual donations, sponsorships, and grants to keep things flowing. While we do charge tuition for our arts education classes, we strive to make them affordable for participants, because we know how tough it is to make ends meet in this beautiful, remote corner of the planet. Thus, the tuition we charge for a typical class does not come close to covering our full costs. Almost all of the fees go directly to the instructor, with Weehawken covering the additional costs of location, promotion, and organization for each class. We believe that the enrichment opportunities we offer are super-important to our community. Studies show that the opportunities kids have when they are young and in school help them to succeed when they are older. And we know that adults also thrive when they have opportunities to find community and nurture their creative spirits. What we do is amazing and valuable. We generate enchantment, and add zest and magic to the community we love. If you are passionate about our community and believe that arts education has an important role to play in its vitality, please take this opportunity to support Weehawken Creative Arts.