Learn. Create.Inspire.Grow. Do it all with Weehawken!
WELCOME TO WEEHAWKEN!
At Weehawken Creative Arts, we are in the business of changing lives, nurturing dreams, and helping kids and adults in Ouray County and neighboring communities discover their creative potential through the arts.
We offer transformative, individualized arts education programming led by extraordinary instructors, as well as a variety of art-inspired events. More than that, we offer a place for you to find your very own community of kindred spirits, wherever your artistic passion lies.
Weehawken Creative Arts was founded in 2004 by Susie Opdahl, a creative dynamo who retired to Ouray from Oregon with her husband, Jim, in the late ‘90s. Susie had a vision to actively engage her new community and help it prosper by creating a program that would offer arts education opportunities for locals and visitors alike.
With the help of a dedicated board of directors, her idea found fertile ground and soon grew from dream to reality in the form of a new nonprofit organization.
At first, Weehawken primarily focused on recruiting adult students from out of the area to Ouray County to take multi-day workshops with well-known instructors. A dozen years or so later, our mission has evolved to focus more actively on serving the needs of our own community. Over 80 percent of our course offerings are geared toward local and regional students.
WEE HAVE A PASSION FOR DANCE Now in its ninth year, Weehawken Dance is our flagship program, reaching close to 150 kids in Ouray County and beyond. We offer the American Ballet Theatre’s national training curriculum, a breakthrough eight-level program that combines high quality artistic training with the basics of dancer health and child development, under the artistic direction of ABT-certified teacher Natasha Pyeatte.
Each dance semester culminates in a spectacular production on the big stage at the Montrose Pavilion, giving all of our dancers a chance to shine. These performances are not to be missed! They reflect Miss Natasha’s talent, vision, and boundless energy as a teacher and choreographer.
While the shows may be great, the real magic happens in our studios every day of the dance semester, where our dancers develop compassion, life skills, self-discipline and belonging, in addition to excellent dance technique.
“I’ve never had this kind of individual attention before in my entire life,” said one student who studied ballet intensively in a metropolitan area before moving to Ridgway as a young teen.
“Nat saw something that nobody had ever seen before. I just blossomed. It makes such a big difference when somebody pays individual attention to a dancer. It just transforms them.”
WEE INSPIRE While you may have come to know about Weehawken Creative Arts through our awesome dance program, we touch lives in Ouray County in many other ways.
Educational Opportunities: Weehawken offers a tantalizing variety of classes and programs for both kids and adults that include visual arts/fine arts, fiber arts, movement arts like fencing and karate, photography, craftsman arts, creative writing, culinary arts, children’s after-school art classes, horticulture, and a variety of other miscellaneous topics tied to the creative process. Visit www.weehawkenarts.org to learn more about our current offerings!
Artist Collective: Over the past year, Weehawken’s All Fired Up! Clay Studio at 167 N. Cora Street in downtown Ridgway has metamorphosed into the SoulShine Studio Artist Collective, a gathering spot in the heart of the Ridgway Creative District where local professional ceramic artists rent studio space and share equipment like kilns, shelves and pottery wheels.
Signature Events: Weehawken also sponsors a variety of art-inspired events that have helped build Ouray County’s reputation as a place where art, artists and art-lovers thrive. • Amateur Sculptor Contest – Now in its fourth year, the Ridgway Amateur Sculpture Contest attracts amateur sculptors as young as 14 from across the Western Slope of Colorado to sculpt five pounds of clay into a masterpiece in just two hours; a panel of professional artists determines the winners and awards hefty cash prizes. • Ridgway Rendezvous Arts and Crafts Festival – This annual two-day festival comes to Ridgway’s beautiful Hartwell Park every summer on the second weekend of August, showcasing fine arts and original crafts from up to 140 talented vendors from across the country. Art demos, free craft activities, great food and libations and family-friendly live entertainment round out the offerings, making this one of the Western Slope’s most highly anticipated art shows of the season. • Gingerbread Houses – Buckets of candy, oodles of frosting, sticky fingers, heaps of smiles, and a kajillion sugar-coated photo ops. That just about sums up our annual gingerbread house decorating event, offered every December to families in Ridgway and Ouray. We consider it a holiday gift to our community! • Sneffels Fiber Fest – More fun than you can shake a knitting needle at!
Weehawken is proud to be the umbrella organization sponsoring this great weekend of fun revolving around the fiber arts that comes to the Ouray County 4-H Event Center each September. • Ouray Fork Fest – Throughout a delicious weekend in early May, foodies from near and far delight in rediscovering all the edible bounty that Ouray and the greater Uncompahgre Valley have to offer, and learn new ways to prepare it for friends and family at home.
WEE BUILD BRIDGES At Weehawken Creative Arts, we are especially proud of our ability build bridges that connect our diverse communities through the arts.
Visit one of our dance studios any day of the week, and you will see what we mean! Students come together from Ouray, Ridgway, Montrose, Silverton and beyond, nurturing friendships outside of school confines and performing together in a supportive environment.
Likewise, our signature events offer artists and community members the opportunity to gather from across the Western Slope, enlivening our local culture and economy.
Our numbers tell the tale: Weehawken offered 286 classes in 2014 and saw at least 1834 enrollments in classes over the past year for both adults and children, while our special events and dance performances enjoyed at more than 11,200 participants last year.
In a community of just 4,557 people,
Weehawken Creative Arts manages to impact
nearly every citizen in one way or another each year, whether through a class, special event or performance!
At Weehawken, we have always focused more on the programs that we offer than the brick and mortar spaces in which they take place. Through the years, we have offered classes in community centers, church basements, B&Bs, and even people’s private kitchens, living rooms and gardens.
We have also supported the economies of both Ridgway and Ouray by renting dedicated classroom and dance studio space in a variety of locations. And we have actively partnered with the Sherbino Theater in Ridgway and Wright Opera House in Ouray, helping breathe life back into those historic venues as we have used them for both classroom space and performance venues.
Weehawken is proud to be a founding member of the Alpenglow Arts Alliance, a groundbreaking collaborative of arts organizations in Ouray County, working together to promote each other’s events and opportunities through a unified voice. We also collaborate closely with the Ridgway Creative District in several of that organization’s monthly events.
WEE RELY ON YOUR SUPPORT Over the years, Weehawken has developed a reputation of excellence within our community. Everything we do, we strive to do it well. When you sign up for a Weehawken program or attend a Weehawken event, you know it will be affordable, well-organized and infused with our special brand of passion and creativity.
Because of our polished presentation, it is easy to assume that we are a well-endowed organization. Actually, we operate on a modest budget that relies largely on individual donations, sponsorships, and grants to keep things flowing.
While we do charge tuition for our arts education classes, we strive to make them affordable for participants, because we know how tough it is to make ends meet in this beautiful, remote corner of the planet.
Thus, the tuition we charge for a typical class does not come close to covering our full costs. Almost all of the fees go directly to the instructor, with Weehawken covering the additional costs of location, promotion, and organization for each class.
We believe that the enrichment opportunities we offer are super-important to our community. Studies show that the opportunities kids have when they are young and in school help them to succeed when they are older. And we know that adults also thrive when they have opportunities to find community and nurture their creative spirits.
At a recent Weehawken board meeting, we spent a long time talking about how to convey the value of Weehawken to our community. A major challenge, we realized, is that arts education is not particularly “sexy.” We are not raising money to send rural kids on the trip of a lifetime, save a historic building, or house homeless kittens and puppies like other worthy nonprofits in our area.
And yet - we think you’ll agree – what we do is amazing and valuable. We generate enchantment, and add zest and magic to the community we love.
If you are passionate about our community and believe that arts education has an important role to play in its vitality, please take this opportunity to support Weehawken Creative Arts.
Weehawken Creative Arts is dedicated to providing high-quality arts and cultural education and personal growth programs to adults and children alike, year-round.
Classes for adults and children in:
Fine Arts
Photography
Dance
Culinary Arts
Horticulture
Fibre Arts
Creative Writing
Craftsman Arts
Children's Arts
Performing Arts
and more!
Don't miss our class-related performances including "The Nutcracker", our Spring Dance Show, our Summer Theatre productions and more!
