Sounds of Summer
The Jacksonville Symphony ended its 2021/22 season on June 11, 2022, with a grand finale of Beethoven’s Ninth: Ode to Joy. The concert, conducted by Music Director Courtney Lewis, featured a quartet of star vocalists, the Symphony Chorus, and the world premiere of Tarik O’Regan’s Jacksonville Symphony commission, Trances. With the first performance of the symphony’s 2022/23 season starting in September, many of the orchestra’s musicians packed their suitcases and embarked on rejuvenating adventures that fuel their passions for music and travel over the summer.
First Coast No More Homeless Pets—A Path Forward
First Coast No More Homeless Pets (FCNMHP) serves a unique role in the world of animal welfare, operating where the needs of people and pets meet in the communities facing the highest rates of poverty and unemployment in Florida.
This year marks an exciting milestone as FCNMHP celebrates 20 years of providing a wide range of affordable and accessible veterinary care. The team will be sharing this news through stories and short videos streamed to thousands of people who follow the organization on social media.
St. Augustine Art Association to Celebrate 100 Years of Art
Nina Hawkins, the first female editor of the St. Augustine Record, saw the need for an organized group to promote the arts in St. Augustine. On January 18, 1924, she gathered together wintering artists and writers to form the Pen & Brush Club, which soon became the Galleon Club, and eventually the St. Augustine Art Association. The organization went through a few fits and starts during its early years, and in 1931 artists Hildegard Müller-Uri and J. Dexter Phinney took the art association to the next level with the intent of making St. Augustine a major winter art colony.
Bouke de Vries: War & Pieces
Bouke de Vries’ “War & Pieces” is a powerful meditation on the follies of war and the dangers of consumerism, mass production, and waste. Trained as a conservator of art objects, de Vries uses broken and discarded ceramics as the primary medium for his artwork, celebrating the “beauty of destruction” through his fragmented sculptures.
Making a Good City Great
Largely ignored by ineffectual leadership, our urban center evolved into a wasteland of demolished buildings, leaving parking lots in its wake while city planners focused on haphazard suburban sprawl. Thankfully, many visionaries with unstoppable momentum believed Jacksonville to be a place on the river full of entertainment, culture, business, and green space that better reflected its citizens’ true potential. Even as city officials continually created new obstacles, these dreamers pressed on with a motto most often echoed throughout the private sector, “Jacksonville could be so great if ____.”
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