The Mary Rodning Arts Education Pavilion

Alabama Contemporary, with support from the Rodning and Comer families, is pleased to announce the construction of a twenty foot by forty foot open air education pavilion at AC Satellite to be named the Mary Rodning Arts Education Pavilion. This pavilion will host the messiest art activities and educational programming we can muster. Open to the Sculpture Garden, it will house a 25 cubic foot gas kiln for ceramics, and provide a shaded area as an outdoor classroom to facilitate plein-air painting, sculpture and ceramics classes, small scale theater productions, movie nights and performances.

There is no better namesake than Mary Rodning, an artist, a beacon of generosity and devoted advocate for the arts. Mary changed this community for the better, shared her skills and talent widely, and helped build cultural assets that serve us to this day and far into the future. Her legacy is beauty, generosity, kindness, and warmth.

Alabama Contemporary Executive Director, elizabet elliott states,

To say it is a deep honor to put Mary Rodning’s name on this structure is an understatement. She is a north star when it comes to art supporters and advocates. I am unlikely to ever meet anyone like her again. The Mary Rodning Arts Education Pavilion is an open air classroom that will act as a lodestone for our entire creative community, it will support so many artists and educate new generations. It is our great privilege to do this work, and to carry Mary Rodning’s legacy forward in this community.

Continued support will go toward the build out, as well as fitting out the outdoor classroom with new tools and equipment, and creating new paid artist opportunities. You can contribute in person by attending the Art Yard Party on August 7, or dedicating your donation in her honor through the link below:

CONTRIBUTE TO THE MARY RODNING ARTS EDUCATION PAVILION

If we, if you and I, are to lead abundant, authentic, conscientious, deliberate, meaningful, and joyful lives, we must embrace the arts – the arts in and of itself and for its own sake and the arts as a complement to humanistic, scientific, athletic, and recreational knowledge and endeavors. The arts are fundamental to our humanity as they stimulate body, soul, mind, and spirit.

The arts enable and inspire us by fostering creativity, by an appreciation for beauty and the good, and by instilling the attributes of innovation, reflection, empathy, tolerance, understanding, and wisdom.
The arts transform the horizons of our thoughts, assumptions, perspectives, ideas, and beliefs, and the horizons of our emotions, feelings, and moods.

And you and I, as citizens of this community and society, as advocates for the common good, as artists, and as patrons of the arts, possess the freedom, privilege, responsibility, and obligation, to share, promote, and support the arts – philosophically, practically, and financially – and to educate and nurture succeeding generations regarding the value of artistic traditions.

Mary Elizabeth Rodning
And Family