According to Youth Services Assistant Kelsey Phipps, the library is hosting art-themed events for the next month to coincide with the Color Our World summer reading program. However, that isn’t the only reason she decided to organize the career fair. She wanted to give area teens an opportunity to learn about jobs not typically represented at career fairs.
“I have so many teens come through the library who are incredibly artistically talented and have expressed interest in pursuing the arts as a career,” she said. “So I just wanted to offer them a way to come and speak to professionals and organizations and learn more about that.”
The event will go from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on June 21 in the library’s community room. The Spiva Center for the Arts is one organization that will be participating. In addition to sharing information about the different jobs at the gallery, Education Director Des Hernandez will also be highlighting the different backgrounds of the Spiva employees.
“We just have varied backgrounds in the building,” they said. “I think it's important to show that there's no one path to get here, and that if it's something that you're passionate about, you'll find your way.”
Hernandez also wants to simply show young artists the spaces available to them, such as the Spiva Center for the Arts.
“The arts community in the area is strong, but it is a smaller arts community,” they said. “So being able to go and represent what is happening in the area, but also showing students that it's possible to find themselves in this field and in these types of places and organizations feels incredibly important to me. That is not representation that I had growing up.”
In fact, the career fair is the type of event Hernandez would have benefited from when they were younger. According to them, they changed their major five times because they weren’t sure they’d find a job in the arts.
“I think if I had that earlier exposure and that earlier support system and community, that my journey would have been a lot easier,” they said. “But I still got where I needed to go, and having this community helped me do that.”
Ultimately, exposure and support for the next generation of artists is the goal of the career fair for Phipps.
“The arts are so important to our communities and to our cultures, and I think it's really important to support kids who are interested in that,” she said. “I think it is kind of a stereotype, that there would be naysayers and people who don't encourage kids to pursue art as a career, but I think that passion is so real. I see it in them, and I am really excited to get to help feed into that and inspire them to pursue the arts.”
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