Tag: board meetings

Dear TRAG Members, Happy February! Hope everyone has enjoyed our unusually sunny weather over the past couple of weeks! I am a lucky lady and will be spending 2/3-2/11 (maybe longer?) in Hawaii! I’m looking forward to the warmth and the sun and swimming with sea turtles. We had our first Board meeting on January 20th and I want to give you an update on what’s to come for TRAG this year. First, I’d like to thank all of you who responded to the questionnaire about the meeting in January and your thoughts on proof of vaccination for meetings. It is so helpful to get input from the membership when trying to make decisions about how to move forward. As you all know, we did cancel the meeting in January due to the very high Covid numbers in Oregon. As a board, we have decided to cancel the February meeting as well and are VERY hopeful that we will, indeed, meet IN PERSON on March 14th! The results of the survey regarding proof of vaccination were: Yes-17; No-12; Maybe-5. The Board discussed this and since it was not an overwhelming YES, we will not require proof of vaccination for meetings, but will require that everyone at the meeting wear a mask and that it is properly worn over the mouth AND nose. We just want everyone to be safe, and we want to meet in person again. As you all know, Trieste Andrews (our immediate past president) has stepped down from coordinating the Oregon City Festival of the Arts (OCFOTA). (It is a well-deserved break!) I’m happy to announce that OCFOTA is on for this year! We have a wonderful trio of women (Jen Henry, Lynda Orzen, & Tima Carlson) who will be coordinating the event this year along with the many dedicated volunteers from years past. OCFOTA is a wonderful event for our organization as well as for the community and we are so happy that it will continue this year. We are also happy to let you know that it looks like we will be able to have a Spring Fling event at the Oregon City Golf Course on Mother’s Day weekend. We are tentatively scheduled for Friday and Saturday, May 6 & 7—that way artists can be with their family on Mother’s Day if that is something you celebrate. It would be and early morning set up on Friday and we’d open for business from 12 pm – 5 pm. Saturday hours would be 10 am – 5 pm. It looks like we’ll have room for 25 artists. The Call for Artists will go out soon with a link to an application. Many thanks to Lynda Orzen for helping to coordinate this and other upcoming events where our artists will be able to sell their work. That is a good segue into the topic of our TRAG Gallery. As you all are aware, we had to close the gallery around August of last year. This was a very tough decision for the TRAG Board and Gallery Managers to make, as we know how important it is for our artists to have an opportunity to display and sell their work in a gallery. However, it just wasn’t feasible to keep it open any longer given the significant decrease in sales and foot traffic. We, of course, are not alone—-many businesses have had to close due to the pandemic. Our landlords at Singer Hill were so gracious and let us continue to store our “stuff” in the gallery space with the hope that we would be able to reopen at some point, however, we received notice in later October that we would need to have all our things out of the gallery space by the end of November 2021 due to them remodeling the space. At our Board meeting in January, after much discussion, we decided that we need to wait for at least a year before we entertain the prospect of finding a new gallery space. Now is just not the right time. Things may look very different in a year, or we may still be in the midst of this pandemic—who knows! What we all agree on is that we want the best chance for the new gallery to be successful—opening and then having to close again would just be so disheartening for all involved. I know this is not the news most of you were hoping to hear and I’m sorry for that. Please feel free to contact me or any of the Board members if you have questions/concerns/thoughts about this. I look forward to seeing everyone again at our March 14th meeting! Same time and place: The Pioneer Center basement meeting room from 7-8:30pm. Come with lots of ideas about what you want from your TRAG membership this year. As always, we welcome and encourage involvement from all the members for any activity/event that we plan. Please let me know if you have an interest in helping with any of the things I’ve presented above. Be well, Tamara Scott TRAG President

Sue Thomas
Membership Coordinator

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