Photos by REDWolf

For many, it is difficult to imagine the Augusta arts community without Brenda Durant’s steady hand at the helm. For 27 years, she was the executive director of the Greater Augusta Arts Council while also building educational/arts-focused programming and serving as a spokesperson and champion for those driven to create. It wasn’t a job for which she had trained. In fact, she still believes her appointment might have been more optimistic and altruistic than expected.

“I had volunteered for organizations,” she says. “I had work experience. But I was also a mother with young children and had never done anything like this. When they asked me why I thought I was qualified – a very good question – I told them it was because I was a creative thinker. I guess that was enough because they took a chance, and for that, I will be forever grateful.”

Durant admits that the Arts Council was a much different organization when she began working for it than it is today. She said that while many of the components of the current model existed, a lot of time and effort went into defining what the Arts Council should do and could do, both then and moving forward.

“One of the first events I attended was a thing called the Lock N’ Ham Jam,” she says, referring to a country music-oriented event that, at one time, had been an Arts Council fundraiser. “I just felt like that was not what we were supposed to be about.” Instead, she decided to focus on new and innovative ways to get art, performance and the people who create in the public eye. It was, she says, a mission developed around a real need.

“From the very beginning I saw that we were getting phone calls about art, murals and public art,” she recalls. “And what we found is that while people were in favor of it in theory, nobody was really doing anything about it in practice.”

Over the years, Durant and her staff developed new opportunities, such as the annual Wet Paint Party, and re-designed existing events like the Arts In the Heart of Augusta Festival, around the idea that promoting awareness of the arts in a strong public way was essential to a healthy community. It was, she admitted, a lofty goal that might have been impossible without the group she refers to as the “magic board.”

“The Arts Council board never told me no,” she explains. “That was powerful. I think that made us, as a staff, very respectful of what we needed to do and, more importantly, needed to be.”

Every success she enjoyed with the Arts Council, she says, can be traced back to the simplest of equations: the people who stood by her side. When discussing her time leading the organization, Durant never self-focuses. Instead, she talks about the accomplishments of the whole, be it the Arts Council staff, the board, the community, or, more often, a combination. She believes every success is a story of people buying into a collective vision. Arts In the Heart is probably the greatest example of how that formula for success works in her opinion.

The event was already a mainstay on the Arts Council calendar when Durant arrived. It had started small and evolved organically over several years. In many ways, the ability to develop contributed to its success, but Durant said it became apparent that for it to thrive and survive, some sense of order had to be established.

“I was raised by a woman who believed that the appearance of things was important,” she recalls. “And I believed that was the case with Arts In the Heart, and that was what I thought we should work toward. And I’ll tell you, some of the ideas we had — like incorporating the uniform tents and in doing so raising participation prices — were not universally embraced. There were those who said people would drop out. Instead, nobody blinked an eye.”

“I’m content … I don’t think I’ve left anything behind … It was always about the community.”

— Brenda Durant

For the full article find a copy of the October 2024 issue of Augusta magazine.

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