Community Fine Arts Center
A unique collaboration of city, county and school district to promote the arts in Sweetwater County, Wyoming.
The Community Fine Arts Center in Rock Springs is a unique collaboration of the City of Rock Springs, Sweetwater County and the local School District # 1. Due to this cooperation, residents and visitors alike can enjoy this "cultural oasis" in southwest Wyoming's high desert country. The CFAC offers a permanent collection and changing displays of fine art as well as a year round schedule of performing arts programs.
We are a non-profit multi-arts center begun in 1966 by a local science teacher with a great love for art and a vision for his school and community. Its beginning started much earlier -- 1939 -- when the first painting was purchased to hang in the local high school. In the summer months, Mr. Elmer Halseth would travel America to buy paintings, drawings and prints for the students of Rock Springs. He used nickels and dimes gathered from school carnivals, bake sales and donation jars during the school year. The first painting purchased,
The Community Fine Arts Center features a changing exhibition schedule of local, regional, and national painters, sculptors, printers, photographers, and craft artists. National traveling exhibitions are also on the calendar, offering traditional and non-traditional displays of contemporary art in America.
In addition to its art exhibitions, the center has gained notoriety as a cultural leader in Southwest Wyoming. It provides a way for children and adults to witness and participate in the performing arts, presenting as many as six venues per year. Symphony, ballet, dramatic and children's theater, jazz, classical, pop and ethnic music and opera are featured in an impressive yearly schedule of events.
The CFAC was instrumental in starting an annual Cowboy Poet and Music Festival held for several years ago in collaboration with the Sweetwater County Events Complex. The Center has proudly hosted such groups as the Utah Symphony, the Arvada Center of the Performing Arts, Diane Witherspoon Jazz Quintet, the David Taylor Dance Theater, the Utah and Jeoffrey Ballets, the Utah Opera and the Basque Ballet of Spain. With each guest's performance, master workshops for local dancers, singers, musicians, and actors are sponsored by the center, expanding the outreach of this southwestern Wyoming home of the arts.
The Community Fine Arts Center serves as a meeting place for cultural and civic groups and offers lectures, demonstrations, and workshops in the visual arts. It celebrates Youth Arts Month each area with displays of artwork from the area schools. A summer "ArtCamp" for ages 10-14 leads students to discover their own creative talents in drawing, painting, sculpture and crafts.
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