Austin Area Arts. New name, same great arts.

Austin, the community in southeast Minnesota where our two physical sites — the Historic Paramount Theatre and the Austin ArtWorks Center — are located.

A vibrant, thriving small city that is home to 24,000 residents, the international headquarters of Hormel Foods Corporation, community partners in healthy living Mayo Clinic Health System, the world-renowned Hormel Institute cancer research center and the one and only Spam Museum.

The area includes a 100-mile radius around Austin including residents and businesses, schools and colleges, farms and prairie land, waterways and highways. This is where we serve. Alma, Wisconsin to Zumbrota, Minnesota. St. Charles, St. James, St. Peter. Lakeville, Postville, Waterville, Janesville. Our closest neighbors — Albert Lea, Adams, Blooming Prairie, Lyle, Grand Meadow, Owatonna — know us best. Our aspirations extend much further.

Arts, expressions of human creativity including literature, performing arts and visual arts. Poetry and painting. Music, movies and mosaic. Sculpture and storytelling. Dance and drawing.

Austin Area Arts is our new name. Each word tells you who we are and what we do.

Established in 1992 as the Austin Area Commission for the Arts, Inc., Austin Area Arts started with a focus on on performing arts at the Historic Paramount Theatre. Since that time, Austin Area Arts has grown to encompass the annual Austin ArtWorks Festival (added 2012) and the Austin ArtWorks Center (added 2014).

Today, Austin Area Arts provides three branches of arts programming:

The Historic Paramount Theatre offers a schedule of about 40 live performances and 50 movies each year.

The Austin ArtWorks Center offers fine art exhibits, jam sessions and concerts, over 50 art education classes for children and adults, studio space and clay cavern access for artists, and a retail space where more than 100 artists, most with ties to Austin, sell original artwork.

The Austin ArtWorks Festival celebrates the literary, performing and visual arts in a 2-day community gathering in the heart of downtown Austin each year. In 2017, it drew over 7,500 visitors to see 55 exhibitors, 17 music acts, nine authors, five actors and nine demonstrating artists.

In 2017, these three programming areas served over 20,000 people and generated a local economic impact of $245,160.

You may also notice what has been eliminated from our name: Commission.

Austin Area Arts is an independent 501(c)3 non profit, not a government entity. We are proud to partner with the City of Austin and Mower County governments but we are not owned or operated by local government. So for the sake of clarity, we are leaving behind ‘commission.’

Here we stand: Austin Area Arts. Working every day to honor our 26-year history and leverage the power of arts to improve lives and the community. New name, same great arts.

Coming soon at the Paramount Theatre

•June 28: $5 Movie: “Grease,” 3 and 7:30 p.m.

•July 4: $5 Movie: “Mary Poppins,” 3 and 7:30 p.m.

•July 11: $5 Movie: “The Muppet Movie,” 3 and 7:30 p.m.

Coming soon at the ArtWorks Center

•June 26-29: Kids Studio Art History Camp, 10:30 a.m. to noon. Attend all four days of the camp or choose the dates that work best. $5 per session.

•July 14: Family Art Studio, 1-3 p.m.