Our Mission
to create a welcoming laboratory for music, visual, and media arts in the high peaks of the Catskill Mountains that brings together rural and urban America.
The Prattsville Arts Center The Center serves Prattsville, nearby towns across Greene, Delaware, Ulster, and Schoharie Counties, and visitors from across NY State and around the world as a holistic arts, youth, and community center, bringing together long time residents and more recent arrivals through free classes and all-ages art, music and performance events. We work to build a sense of belonging across generations and backgrounds, nurturing diverse new friendships, art appreciation, job skills, and entrepreneurial projects in a welcoming space that offers art and music materials, fireplaces, and professional social services, which did not previously exist in this remote rural region.
The Center houses a cafe, gallery, library, wi-fi computer lab, and residencies for artists, and is home to online projects, music, community meals, classes, and art exhibitions, as well as a mid-summer festival.
OUR HISTORY
Recovering From Hurricane Irene
The Prattsville Art Center was founded in 2012 to anchor the recovery of a rural Catskill Mountain town whose Main Street was destroyed by flooding from Hurricane Irene. The Town of Prattsville, a historic site, lost 40% of the buildings on its Main Street when they were washed off their foundations and into the rushing floodwaters. The Art Center is located in one of the town’s damaged historic buildings , which was saved through support from ArtPlace America, NY State, and the local community. Artists and community members have continuously worked together on the recovery and redesign of the Town in the years following the disaster, reimagining the role of art and artists in community recovery.
The Art of Resilience: Designing the future with rural communities
In 2024 the Center will host “The Art of Resilience,” a symposium and exhibition that brings together rural communities with artists, architects, planners, landscape architects, and filmmakers to consider planning and design ideas that transcend gentrification & extraction economies.
This work has received seed funding from the NEA Design Program and builds on an NEA Our Town Grant completed in 2022 that brought the artists of New Orleans Airlift to Prattsville to create a Music Box on Main Street – a magical project focused on playable musical architecture that will be used as an interactive performance space and recording studio by visiting musicians, artists in residence, and the local community to create a new world of musical form right here on Main Street.
