Now that you’re out of the food coma and hopefully got to enjoy shopping downtown on Small Business Saturday it’s almost time for Giving Tuesday. This Tuesday we hope you’ll consider supporting Creative Downtown Appleton and our partner Sculpture Valley. Together we strive to increase arts and culture in downtown Appleton. This season we’re asking for your help focusing on what to do next year. We have a number of potential projects for 2018 and we’d like your help deciding what to focus on and making them happen. You can donate and vote for what you think we should work on next.

The projects we’re considering are:

• Outdoor Musical Instruments: Create your own music outdoors any time of year! We have one already, but we’d love to make a duet possible!
• Acre of Art: In 2017 we saw the amazing impact sculptures can have on the beauty of downtown and we want to help expand the program!
• Avenue of Angels: Continue to grow the holiday tradition and add another intersection of angels.
• New Public Mural: The explosion of murals around downtown has changed the way we see and experience our town and there’s still room for more.
• Create an Artistic Alley: Enhance an alley or other underutilized space downtown to make it more beautiful and interactive.
• Make Downtown More Pet Friendly: Help make downtown more welcoming for our four-legged friends, let’s step it up in 2018!

Or tell us what YOU think Downtown needs!

Sculpture Valley was formally founded in 2013 to establish the Fox Valley as a showcase for public art. They help restore and preserve historic sculptural pieces in the area such as “The Spirit of the American Doughboy” as well as curating the growth of more public art. They founded Acre of Art, a new program for 2017. Acre of Art is the first annual juried outdoor sculpture exhibit of its kind in the Fox Valley showcasing sculpture while enhancing Appleton’s public spaces. If you’ve seen the sculptures around downtown then you know the impact they make on our community. Just this month they oversaw the effort to restore the “The Spirit of the American Doughboy” honoring Outagamie County soldiers that served in World War I.

Creative Downtown Appleton, the 501(c)3 affiliate of Appleton Downtown, Inc. was founded three years ago to help grow the arts and cultural environment of downtown. With your help we increase community access to arts, music and cultural activities in the public realm. Since its founding, we’ve been able to grow our public programming and engage the public in new and different ways. School children helped beautify downtown through the Out of the Box traffic box program, the Parklet Place renovation, new murals are going up all over town, and so much more.

Thank you for reading, and we hope you’ll take time to make a donation and vote between now and Tuesday!