Tacoma Arts Month kicks off with AMOCAT awards, Armory party

A university, a library and a poet have been awarded this year’s AMOCAT arts awards by the City of Tacoma, which will be presented Oct. 1 at the free public kickoff party for Tacoma Arts Month. The annual awards honor patrons, organizations and individuals who make a difference to Tacoma’s arts scene.

This year, the Arts Patron award goes to the University of Washington, Tacoma; the Community Outreach by an Organization award goes to the Tacoma Public Library and the Outreach by an Individual award goes to poet Connie Walle.

The party, meanwhile, features local artists, dancers and musicians in the historic Armory building, along with food and a no-host bar.

Tacoma Arts Month, organized by the Tacoma Arts Commission, is an annual event in October that celebrates the city’s arts scene with regular events plus special events like the art studio tour (Oct. 17-18) and poetry festival (Oct. 16-17), workshops and classes, and contests.

Among the performers at the Arts Month opening party will be the Barefoot Dance Collective, Samoan dancers from the Asia Pacific Cultural Center, musician Ken Jacobsen and Tacoma’s poet laureate Cathy Nguyen. There also will be pop-up multimedia art exhibits by Christopher Jordan, Isaac Olsen, Jennifer Chushcoff, Nichole Rathburn, Janet Marcavage, Tim and April Norris, Terese Cuff, Elizabeth Gahan, Diana Leigh Surma and Judd Cohen, plus appetizers, desserts and a no-host bar in the recently restored Armory.

At 7:45 p.m., Mayor Marilyn Strickland will present the annual AMOCAT awards to the three winners.

Partners with many arts groups in Tacoma, the UWT has spent its 25 years as a new campus developing education, events and a public art collection. Efforts include glass art classes hosted at the Museum of Glass, Tacoma School of the Arts classes held on campus, and a partnership with Spaceworks Tacoma to support creative entrepreneurs. The campus’ portion of the Prairie Line Trail hosts several important pieces of public art, with more inside the building including works by Picasso and Chihuly.

Constantly hosting free readings, art exhibits, concerts, films and more, the Tacoma Public Library offers Tacomans of all economic abilities the chance to learn about and participate in the arts. It brings writers and readers together with book talks and the citywide reading program Tacoma Reads Together, hosts exhibits in the main branch’s Handforth Gallery and gives teens the chance to learn digital creativity in the main branch’s StoryLab.

Walle has been honored not just for her own writing, but for uniting Tacoma’s poetry community. She is the founder and president of the Puget Sound Poetry Connection, a 25-year-old group which has brought national and regional poets to Tacoma as well as organizing literary publications, contests, workshops and the first-ever Tacoma Poetry Festival this October.

Also to be announced will be the 2015 Arts Commission grant recipients, which includes larger organizations for the anchor fund grants, specific projects for the arts projects grants and individual artists for the Tacoma Artist Initiative Program. For a complete listing, see tacomaculture.org/arts.

This story was originally published September 15, 2015 at 6:53 AM with the headline "Tacoma Arts Month kicks off with AMOCAT awards, Armory party."