(L to R: Sue, Rachel, Leslyn)
On November 14th, CAP held a Celebration of the Arts for our 2023 donors, sponsors, and grantees.
At the event, we gathered everyone into our CAP Artspace and presented three awards to three community leaders who have spearheaded and supported the creation of a vibrant arts community. We thank these recipients for their heartfelt and wonderful comments.
Leslyn McBean-Clairborne and Rachel Lampert were the recipients of CAP’s Community Arts Catalyst Award (for spearheading the creation of vibrant art and arts opportunities in Tompkins County), and Sue Perlgut was the recipient of CAP’s Friend of the Arts award for her generous support of the Community Arts Partnership’s mission to advance the Arts throughout Tompkins County.
Leslyn McBean-Clairborne is many things in Tompkins County. She has been the Director of the Greater Ithaca Activities Center (GIAC) for 7 years, prior to which she served as the Deputy Director since 2003. She has served the community as a member of the Tompkins County Legislature for over 20 years and was vice-chair for three years and Chair of the Legislature for 2 years.
Leslyn has been an important advocate for human rights and diversity in Tompkins County through her work at GIAC and the legislature. She is also a trained actress and performer, spoken work artist and narrator, has been seen in many local stage productions and has written and performed her own theatrical work. Most of her self-composed work focuses on introducing audiences to the Black experience and to Black history.
Under her guidance, the Greater Ithaca Activities Center has a truly amazing staff that provide the community with exceptional and innovative arts programs, many funded by Community Arts Partnership grants. Those include monthly performers for the Senior Breakfast, the GIAC Jumpers, Phat Flow Factory (a rap and spoken work group), the Urban Art group, and local performers at their Black History Month and Festival of Nations events. In addition, she has worked with staff to offer a Performance Arts school-year group with emphasis on creating music, playing instruments, and voice training.
Rachel Lampert is a playwright, director, and choreographer who began her career in NYC. In 1997, she was appointed Artistic Director of the Kitchen Theatre Company and during her twenty-year tenure, she focused on expanding the repertory to include new plays, alternative theatrical formats, solo performances, movement-based work, and original musicals.
A strong advocate for young theater artists, she gave first-time directing opportunities to many young directors, mostly women, who continue to make theater nationwide. She championed playwrights by producing early-career writers on the Kitchen Theatre Mainstage and broadened the experience of the audience by hosting Kitchen Counter Culture, a series devoted to BIPOC solo performers. She has directed and choreographed at the Hangar Theatre, and has served on the INHS Board.
She started her own company, Fitz&Startz Productions, in 2015 to have a home for her plays for younger audiences.
She retired from the Kitchen in 2017 and then came out of retirement and returned to lead the theater for their 2023-24 season and to help it find a sustainable future.
Her solo work is vast! Read much more about Rachel at her wikipedia page.
This year’s recipient of our CAP Friend of the Arts Award is local artist Sue Perlgut.
In addition to being a supporter of Tompkins County arts organizations, Sue has created a large body of work with lasting and local impact.
She has worked in theatre in NYC and Ithaca for more than 40 years as a teacher, actor, director, storyteller, puppet maker and playwright. Sue co-founded It’s All Right To Be Woman Theatre in NYC in 1970, a troupe that performed stories from their lives and is now featured in a documentary by Sue and Nils Hoover. She founded The Senior Troupe of Lifelong, where for 23 years she directed, wrote, and sometimes performed as the troupe told stories from their lives. In the 1980’s, Sue was director of our predecessor, the Tompkins County Arts council.Sue was one of the organizers of the Women’s March in Ithaca in 2017 and made a short video to capture that day. This past fall Sue was one of the organizers, along with End Abortion Stigma, of Ithaca’s first Reproductive Justice Film Festival held at Cinemapolis. Sue has, in the past, served as board chair of GIAC, the Kitchen Theatre, and the Tompkins County Tourism Board. She is currently co-Chair of the board of Cinemapolis.
Sue formed CloseToHome Productions in 2007 to reach a wide-ranging audience with videos that feature topical and socially relevant issues. See them at CloseToHomeproductions.com