Celebrating a Decade of the Arts at Seniors College

Seniors College of PEI announced an exciting new project at its Christmas Get Together held on December 6th at the Jack Blanchard Family Centre. With funding from a Government of Canada

New Horizons Leadership grant, the project will celebrate the accomplishments of its member artists, writers, musicians, photographers and actors who have developed their skills in courses taken at Seniors College over the past ten years.

Seniors College will mount an exhibition of paintings, drawings and digital photographs by students of art classes held throughout the Island. Their work will appear in a gallery exhibition and will continue to appear in a virtual gallery on-line.

In addition, the College will publish a journal of creative writings by the students of the creative writing classes, both in hard copy and on-line.

The choral music class will produce a CD of their music from the past several years and share it with the community on-line.

Finally, the most ambitious part of the project will be the launch of The Venerables, a play that ran for over 20 years and helped focus attention on issues and societal views on aging. This will be a live production with a web based version also available.

“This is an important and exciting community project,”says Ian Scott, Past President of Seniors College and Chair of the New Horizons Project. “For everyone learning new skills in retirement, having their work publicly displayed or aired recognizes the value and enrichment that their creative efforts give to our own communities and worldwide on the Internet.”

Julie Dowling, President of Seniors College, says, “After a decade of developing creative arts programs for hundreds of PEI seniors all across the Island, we wanted to celebrate these contributions by sharing their work with the broader community. Now, with the help of the New Horizons grant, all four components of the project will come together at a celebration event in the fall of 2011.”

Seniors College is a dynamic and rapidly growing organization devoted to providing learning opportunities for seniors on Prince Edward Island. The College offers a wide range of stimulating courses in three regions of PEI from October to May.