St. Peter’s

Dispatch: Summer 2011

The St. Peter’s Summer Drawing Studio

Some really exciting things are happening at St. Peter’s these days. The month of August saw a first-of-its-kind in Morristown: the St. Peter’s Summer Open Drawing Studio, a unique “pop-up” art experiment on St. Peter’s campus. The region’s artists – and everybody else, in fact – were invited to come draw here five days a week, during three 3-hour sessions every day from Wednesday through Sunday throughout the month – for free. Artists on site offered teaching in the mornings, and visitors could work on portraits, still-life, and architectural drawing in the afternoons, and life-drawing from models in the evenings.

Here’s a comment about the experiment, from the project’s Updates page (where you can see some of the artwork produced during the project):

Your project is amazing! Sometimes it seems life drawing has disappeared from the art world but you’ve brought it back in a huge way. Congratulations.

And another comment:

I love this enough to try to start one here in Tennessee. Thanks for the inspiration. ~gail.

And another:

Your underlying concept is so beautifully simple. You should visit every city in the world doing pop-up drawing studios – wouldn’t that be a blast?!?

Dr. Darryl Roland arrives

Dr. Darryl Roland, St. Peter’s new Director of Music, also arrived in August. Dr. Roland comes to St. Peter’s from The Cathedral Church of St. John in Wilmington, Delaware, where, over the course of his 16 years there, he built the most amazing and accomplished Choir School from the ground up.

Dr. Roland’s Choir School program received the “Coming up Taller Award” for outstanding after-school programs for children and youth from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities and its partner agencies. The choir performed at the awards ceremony at the White House, where then-First Lady Laura Bush served as honorary chair of the committee.

Read about, and see photos from, the Cathedral Choir’s July 2011 tour of Washington D.C. here; watch videos about the Choir School here. Here’s one of them, “Kids & Company Episode 6“:

Remarkably, 100% of Choir School kids have gone on to apply to, and attend, college.

In January of 2012, Dr. Roland will travel to England to receive an Honorary Fellowship Diploma from the international Guild of Church Musicians for his work at the choir school.

We are excited almost beyond words to have Dr. Roland here, and look so forward to the things we’re sure he will put his boundless creative energy to use to accomplish.

More about St. Peter’s

Communities of worship like ours have always been gathering places in the life of towns and cities across the country and across the world, and that’s our hope:  to be a place of welcome and comfort to people who need help and to those who want to be part of what we do here.   Janet talks a lot about that in her sermons and in her writing;  members of St. Peter’s offer a lot to the community and the world, via the Soup Kitchen and our Community Ministries and many other Outreach efforts;  Henry Faulkner draws his terrific cartoons for us, and we’re thrilled to be supporting the arts in this and other ways.

St. Peter’s future is very bright; we have a lot of creative and interesting people doing some unique and really inspiring things here. We’re so happy to be part of the Morristown community and of MorristownGreen.com’s work here.