Bookmarks and Art for Art’s Sake share award for collaboration -

Posted: Saturday, February 6, 2016 11:30 pm

By Lynn Felder Winston-Salem Journal

The Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County presents awards to organizations and individuals who have made a difference in the arts community throughout the year. In 2015, they presented the Arts Council Award, R. Philip Hanes Junior Young Leader Award, Arts Educator Excellence Award, Arts Development Award, Arts Knowledge Sharing Award and a Special Recognition. This is the fourth of six articles profiling the winners.

In 2011, Ginger Hendricks, executive director of Bookmarks, went looking for connections.

Hendricks wanted to get middle and high school students involved in Bookmarks, work with other arts organizations and bring the literary and visual arts together.

Guided by the late Guy Blynn, who was then president of Bookmarks’ board, Hendricks found a partner in Harry Knabb, executive director of Art for Art’s Sake, aka AFAS.

AFAS’s goal is to build, educate and celebrate community through art. It produces Arts on Sunday on Trade Street in May and October, which includes arts, crafts and music. It runs a year-round gallery, Red Dog Gallery, and art classes — Arts Unleashed — for all ages. AFAS also created ARTivity on the Green, an art park on Liberty Street that opened in May. AFAS has plans for a building on Liberty Street.

Bookmarks’ goal is to connect readers with authors. It achieves this by holding the largest annual book festival in North and South Carolina, this year set for Sept. 8-10, and producing Triad-based author talks and an Authors in Schools program.

Together, Hendricks and Knabb came up with a clever project to engage young people. They created a contest in which middle and high school students in Forsyth County vie to have their work printed on 5,000 bookmarks.

Students choose images of readers, writers, favorite characters, scenes or lines from literature. Then they create visual art to be on the bookmark.

The first contest was held and bookmarks printed in 2012.

“We honored the winners at the Bookmarks’ Festival opening ceremony in 2012 and 2013,” Hendricks said. “And increased the Bookmarks/AFAS partnership in 2014 and 2015 to include a juried art exhibition for AFAS artists which displays adult artists’ works alongside the student winner, second place, third place and two honorable mentions in the Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts.”

At the art opening in August, “Unbound and Unleashed: Celebrating Books & Authors Through Art,” the partners unveiled the winning bookmark and honored five students.

For this effort, the arts council has awarded them the Arts Development Award.

“The award recognizes an innovative, collaborative project ... that spurs new audiences to participate in the arts and culture of Winston-Salem/Forsyth County,” said Shaheen Syal, chair of the arts council’s Awards Committee and the communications director for the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.

Both Bookmarks and AFAS are arts council members.

A committee of eight artists from AFAS selects the bookmark winners. This committee meets with the students and is able to encourage these budding artists.

“This year we are going to send an artist into the schools before the contest to teach students how to brainstorm and get ideas for creating the bookmarks,” Hendricks said.

Cheryl Davis, an artist and AFAS board member, was a judge for the 2015 contest.

“These entries illustrated a wealth of talent and love of reading,” Davis said. “Entries were judged on originality of thought, dynamic contrast of color, image and carrying an idea to artistic fruition.

“Our 2015 contest winner, Alana Hyman, displayed all of this criteria in her bookmark entry ‘Fahrenheit 451.’ The imagery produced by this young artist provokes a feeling of passion and palpable energy as a bird rises flaming from the text of a book filled with mystery and expectation. Beautiful!”

The bookmarks are distributed to libraries, businesses, sponsors and supporters. Forsyth County school libraries receive these bookmarks to distribute to students, further honoring the student winner — and getting the word out about Bookmarks and AFAS.

“At the (Bookmarks) festival, when we sell a book, we put a bookmark in it,” Hendricks said. “It’s amazing for the students to see their work being looked at and talked about.”

Hendricks, 37, was named the executive director of Bookmarks in 2010. She graduated from Salem College with a degree in communication and creative writing. She has a master’s degree in writing from Vermont College.

She served for four years as the director of the Center for Women Writers and coordinator of cultural events at Salem College, and from 2003-05, as assistant to the dean of cultural and special programs at Elon University.

She is the former treasurer for the N.C. Writers’ Network, and her fiction and nonfiction have been published locally and nationally.

Hendricks was awarded the Young Alumna Award by Salem College in 2010. In 2015, she was recognized by the Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce as a winner of the Winston Under 40 Leadership Award.

Her husband, Heath Combs, also provided a link to Knabb and AFAS. As a member of the Camel City Buskers, Combs is among the first musicians to perform in AFAS’s Arts on Sunday events. They have two children, Dalton William Combs, 4, and Monroe Niven Combs, 9 months.

“Gingers is an outstanding arts partner and collaborator,” Knabb said. “She asks questions, she has answers and she’s detail-oriented. That’s what has secured the success of this program.”

Knabb, 68, received a bachelor’s degree from Upsala University in New Jersey and then went to work for the CIA. After two years, with a baby on the way, he left to work in the private sector.

From 1972 to 1976, he worked for Yardley of London in the U.S. In 1976, he came to Hanes Corp. to help start L’Erin Cosmetics.

In 1982, Knabb joined Trans World Marketing. He served as senior vice president, heading up a regional office in Winston-Salem for the next 30 years until his retirement in 2012.

He has been married to Julie Knabb, a jewelry artist, for 20 years and has two children and three grandchildren. He and a group of like-minded people started The AFAS Group in 2007.

“It’s really nice to win the award,” Knabb said. “It’s good for the city to have these things going on, and I hope we can inspire other groups to collaborate.”