This new website is made possible, in part, through support from the County of Ulster’s Ulster County Cultural Services and Promotion Fund administered by the Dutchess County Arts Council. The Pine Hill Community Center is pleased to be a recipient of this grant, which supports capacity building projects for arts and cultural organizations throughout the County.

From the very start in 2000 the Pine Hill Community Center has had a strong focus in the arts. Here in our corner of northwestern Ulster County we have been arts pioneers. We’ve brought countless arts programs to both youth and adults, including music, dance, painting, pottery, photography, drama and writing. We were the first to organize studio tours of Shandaken artists, have showcased countless local performers as well as some international acts, and have provided opportunities for both youth and adults to learn about and develop their skills in all artistic disciplines.

You may wonder why a Community Center has devoted so much of its programming to the arts. We are here to build community, organic support networks, and to enrich the lives of those who live in and visit our area. Simply put, we have found the arts to be one of the best ways to accomplish these purposes. The arts build community by bringing people together. A small example of this is at our Upstage Community Coffeehouses, where four performers share their music to an audience in an intimate, unplugged cabaret setting. The performers all sit on stage, one performing a song, then another, in an “in the round” format. Time and again I see new relationships form not only between the musicians, but between the musicians and the audience, and the audience with the audience. Everyone is brought together in the common experience of the songs, which often create an atmosphere of intimacy and vulnerability that is not generally reached during most social occasions. This is exactly how the arts build community, inspire the formation of organic support networks, and enrich our lives.

The arts celebrate those things that we all share as humans. Whether they make us laugh, cry or cringe, the arts are mirroring the best and the worst in all of us. Because they mirror our common humanity the arts can bring us together and, when used with these intentions, create profound opportunities for healing. When we loose sight of those experiences, emotions, and reflections that make us human we begin to loose sight of each other, and when we loose sight of each other we begin to court disaster. The Center exists as both a product of, and reminder of, the power we have in not loosing sight of each other, and so we have made it our commitment to not loose sight of the arts!