BY MIKE WARREN
EDITOR
MARSHFIELD – The Chestnut Center for the Arts has been around now for two decades, and those who run the place hope you’ll be able to enjoy it for at least another twenty years.

“We want to be here for the city of Marshfield and the surrounding community,” said board member and volunteer Edie Smazal, during our May 16 tour of the facility.

The nonprofit Chestnut Center for the Arts was founded in the summer of 2003 by a local couple and art lovers who had common visions to transform a historic building into a community arts center, according to the center’s website. Chestnut Center for the Arts – officially opened in 2004 – exists today due to broad community support, various fundraisers and by renting out space in the building, which served for many years as First Presbyterian Church.

“We support our selves through the gallery and through things that we sell,” said Smazal. “We reach out to different artists we know of. We try to keep it fairly local. Normally we get artists from central Wisconsin. We find them at art fairs. We find people that just do interesting things. We try to get a variety of artists.”

And while the Chestnut Center features plenty of art, it also has actual artists. Gene Wesley and Kathryn Petke are currents artists in residence whose paintings are being featured this month at the Chestnut Center, which gets a small percentage of each painting’s proceeds.

Also featured is the center’s “Once Loved Art,” a growing collection which has been donated to support community art and theatre programs for all ages.

But there are many forms of art, and the Chestnut Center has them all.

“Being an arts center, we don’t just focus on art itself,” Smazal noted. “We also focus on theatre arts and we focus on music and we’re trying to get a variety of the arts here, as much as we possibly can offer. We’re somewhat limited with our spacing.”

In the spacing it does have – thanks to an education wing which the church added in 1960 – the Chestnut Center offers a lot, from oil-painting, watercolor, and rose mauling classes to Taekwondo and Zumba classes, and more.

“We’re really trying to reach out to the community,” says Smazal, who teaches toddler music classes.

“I was teaching music in public schools and I was retiring from Spencer, and I thought, ‘I want to do something with music.’ I did K-12 and I thought, ‘I’ll try toddlers,’ and I just love it. It’s been twelve years now,” recalled Smazal. “And as you gradually get involved in the place, you understand what they’re doing and you get excited about their mission, and I was capable of doing some of those things. It’s been a real exciting thing for me because I see this place growing and expanding and people coming here and wanting to be a part of it, and I just want the community to know about us and know that we are vital and we are there for everybody.”

Everybody, and just about anything.

“The arts are food for the soul,” said Smazal. “Our community has been real supportive of needs of the community, like a family that needs help or they raise money for so-and-so, and I think we forget that we need support for our own souls. And whether it’s coming to a performance or whether it’s taking an art class, some people send us real nice heartfelt notes about, ‘Boy, this class meant a lot to me,’ ‘I didn’t know I had this much talent,’ or ‘The teacher was so good about making me feel good, not knowing what I was doing, and I really came away with something really special.’ People love taking our clay class and our stained glass classes.”

The performance venue regularly features musical and comedy acts, plays by various groups – including the Marshfield Area Actors – and more.  

The center will also host “Enchanted Forest,” a series of summer theatre camps, June 24-27 and July 22-25, for students in grades 3 through 6.

A summer art camp, “Exploring the Wonders of Nature,” is also planned for July 15-18, for students in grades 1 through 8.

“We get involved with Make Music Day,” Smazal added. “We were one of the groups that organized that, and this is our fourth year coming up June 21, so we’re having entertainment at Wenzel Plaza and Columbia Park.”

On June 15, the Chestnut Center will host a Daddy/Daughter Date Night event. There will also be an open house July 27, during Main Street Marshfield’s annual Hub City Days celebration. Other upcoming events include the classical chamber music of South Beach Up North on Saturday, Aug. 3. The Old Time Brass polka band will be featured during the Harvest Moon Family Dance, Saturday, Sept. 14. A Halloween Dance will follow on Friday, Oct. 25, complete with costume judging and DJ Ben Holbeck. And this November, the center will host “An Evening of Jazz,” featuring musicians from area high school jazz bands.

“And then afterwards we’re going to have a little reception and have a birthday cake,” Smazal added.

That event will mark the 100th anniversary of the one-time First Presbyterian Church holding its first service in that building in December of 1924.

Jamaican Kitchens Catering is headquartered at Chestnut, as is Jenni Jane Photography. And there’s space available for rent, like the music therapist who currently rents a room for her practice. A few spaces remain on the lower level.

“It’s a quiet area of the building,” Smazal says. “You’re not getting too much interruption here.”

The ballroom is also featured on the lower level of the building, which has featured fundraising events, live music and more.

“What we’re looking at for the future – and we’ve priced this out with some estimates and some different things – is to get a lift to take people into the ballroom,” said Smazal. “And then to get you from the street, we would have another lift or possibly a ramp and then a handicapped bathroom. That’s what we’re hoping to look at in the future, to make the building accessible to our people. The Aster building across the street, you know, we want them to come to our events. They want them to be here for things, and they can get upstairs currently, but not down.”

“We’re looking for support,” Smazal told us. “We’ve been doing the Art Champions campaign. We would like to reach fifty-thousand to cover our costs. We have to keep this building running. We have lots of rooms that haven’t been named yet, so we’re hoping we can keep ourselves around for another twenty years. The thing that’s holding us back is just the funding that we need to keep from year to year, because we want to be long-range planners. We’re starting an endowment fund and we’re hoping that people think of us in their estate planning and think of giving us something to keep us secure so that we’re not going year to year hoping, ‘Are we going to survive?’ We need to have the arts in Marshfield.”

The Chestnut Center is also available to rent for weddings, parties, meetings and more.

You can visit during normal business hours, Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., or by appointment. The center’s website is www.chestnutarts.org.