What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
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6 WHAT'S UP! DECEMBER 27, 2020-JANUARY 2, 2021 TOP 5 CACHE Weaves Cultural Web Goal is supporting 'artists, arts organizations and arts patrons' LARA JO HIGHTOWER NWA Democrat-Gazette W hen the Walton Family Foundation commissioned a cultural study of Northwest Arkansas in 2015, they discovered something surprising: Though the area was already rife with well-known cultural institutions like Crystal Bridges Museum, the Walton Arts Center and TheatreSquared, Northwest Arkansas is a community hungry for more. Young professionals and parents expressed a yearning for additional nightlife options. As a society growing ever more diverse, there was an expressed desire for a cultural landscape that reflected that diversity. And, above all, those already working in the arts and culture field indicated that — in order to maximize growth — more cohesion and communication was necessary among the arts organizations, both big and small, in Northwest Arkansas. Enter CACHE, the one-year-old regional arts services organization funded by the Walton Family Foundation and housed within the Northwest Arkansas Council. CACHE — the acronym for Creative Arkansas Community Hub and Exchange — was designed, according to a news release, to "elevate and support all members of the region's arts and culture ecosystem, whether they're artists, arts organizations or arts patrons." The CACHE website lists a six- prong approach to supporting the arts scene through diversity and inclusion, entrepreneurship, talent attraction, health care transformation, economic development and workforce development. CACHE wasted no time in getting started: Allyson Esposito, a former senior director of arts and culture at the Boston Foundation, took the reins in July 2019 with ideas already percolating for how to build the organization from the ground up. "I think the vision for this organization is being a part of a community where the arts make a difference to every other aspect of life," Esposito said in a Sunday Profile article in this newspaper last month. "We don't think about the arts as 'on high' or the arts as a particular discipline. We're really talking about creativity, which is something that we all have within us and is inherent in everything that we do, including business and innovation and all of the things that are going on. "If we can start to talk about creativity as inherent in the way that we experience people, in the way that we economically develop, the way we grow and the way we spend time together, that's really the core and central goal. We have all the raw materials here. It's an incredibly rich cultural region." The witty rap "Wash Your Hands" performed by BAANG (Jeremiah Pickett) is a highlight of OZCast Episode 1, featuring pandemic-appropriate lines like, "You can touch my heart and soul, but first wash your hands, baby." (Courtesy Photo)