The Melrose Messenger

Follow Your Art To Host a Variety of Community Events This Winter

By Ellen Putnam

Melrose is emerging from a quiet January into a busier late winter season, and Follow Your Art Community Studios (FYACS) is driving much of that increased activity with a number of new events aimed at community members with a variety of interests, experiences, and skill levels. Participants can join a jam session, a storytelling workshop, a poetry jam, a flower arranging workshop, or attend an indoor Porchfest concert or a book launch, in addition to Follow Your Art’s more familiar offerings of visual art workshops and classes for both children and adults.

“This is very much a transition time for us,” said Executive Director and Founder Kris Rodolico. Five years after FYACS became a nonprofit, Rodolico went on, “we’re still figuring out who we are to the community, and how we fit in.”

When FYACS first opened for in-person programming after the pandemic, their focus was on art classes, especially for children. “That’s what I brought from when Follow Your Art was my business,” Rodolico explained. While there is still a lot of demand for school break programming, enrollment in after school classes for kids has leveled off. “And that’s fine,” said Rodolico, “because it’s not our only thing. Now that we’ve settled into our revenue streams as a nonprofit, we’ve been asking ourselves: what else can we be to the community? That’s what this year has been.”

One answer to that is in the partnerships FYACS has formed with a range of creative individuals and community organizations to host events that might not otherwise have a venue. “Each one of these things we’re doing,” said Rodolico, “we’ve come at them in different ways, but they all highlight what we’re trying to do in the community, which is to be a resource for creative outlets.”

“That’s the magic of having a place like this,” Rodolico went on. “None of this is stuff I would have come up with on my own. That’s the difference between when Follow Your Art was my business, versus now, as a community space. We’re not in the habit of saying no, we’re in the habit of saying: how can we make that work?”

One new program, which Rodolico calls her “pet project,” is the storytelling series, which is funded by a grant from the Melrose Cultural Council. In the past Follow Your Art has held storytelling nights that were run entirely by volunteers. “I love storytelling,” said Rodolico, “and I want to build a culture of storytelling in the community. It’s been piecemeal over the last couple of years, and we’ve only booked storytelling nights when we can get the volunteers.”

What will make this series different is that it will feature a four-week workshop led by Stellar Story Company, an organization that helps people of all backgrounds and experience levels develop their own ability to tell a story. The workshop is intended for anyone who is interested in learning to tell a story, including those who may be nervous about speaking in front of an audience. The workshop will help participants take an event that happened to them and learn how to turn it into a story they can tell in five to seven minutes. “There is an art form to it,” explained Rodolico.

FYACS will host storytelling nights on March 9th and May 3rd, which will be free and open to everyone, including those who just want to come and listen. In between, Stellar will run the four-week workshop, where participants can hone their own stories, which they can choose to tell at the May 3rd storytelling night.

“It’s the friendliest group,” Rodolico said. “It’s not a competition; we don’t do story slams. We don’t even have themes. We want people to feel like they can come and just tell a story.”

Follow Your Art will also be hosting a free poetry jam on March 16th. A board member suggested asking Jamele Adams, who performs under the name Harlym125 and hosts poetry jams at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, whether he would be willing to host a jam at FYACS. “It’s another one of these things where we have this cool thing that can happen because he’s volunteering his time for this event,” said Rodolico. She emphasized that the event is aimed at both poets and audience members; there is no pressure to perform. And just like with the storytelling nights, the event will be cooperative and supportive, not competitive.

FYACS will also be expanding its musical offerings over the next few months. The Live From the Living Room concert series in the fall was a successful foray into making Follow Your Art a live music venue, and those concerts will resume in the spring. Rodolico explained the balance of finding artists to perform in such a small venue: “We pull people from the Boston area,” she said, “who already have an audience we can draw in, but they can’t be so big that we can’t afford them.”

In nice weather, the concerts are held on the new patio behind the Big Yellow House, which allows Follow Your Art to sell more tickets, which in turn benefits both the artist and FYACS. The concerts, whether they are held inside or out on the patio, provide an intimate space for the audience to listen to talented singer-songwriters who bring a range of styles and material to Melrose.

Rodolico is also collaborating with Melissa Landon, who runs the annual Melrose Porchfest event in September. “Porchfest is this amazing community thing that happens once a year,” said Rodolico, “and there are so many musicians. We thought, can we give them a venue at other times in the year? Mel has been a great steward of Porchfest, and it has sponsors, so we’re able to pay the musicians. I don’t want to ask artists to do things for free,” Rodolico added. “The arts have value, and artists need to get paid.”

This winter’s jam sessions came out of another collaboration: local musician Jenny Montrose came to Rodolico and asked about hosting monthly jam sessions. “We worked on what it would look like,” said Rodolico, “As an organization, we are really willing to work with the community on creative endeavors that are not started by us. That was her thing.”

Many of these events are still in what Rodolico calls the “pilot phase.” “The nice thing is,” she explained, “you can do anything a couple of times and see what happens. You see how it goes. If people are responding, we’ll keep doing it. If people say, ‘this is not what we want,’ then we’ll think of something else.”

Posted February 9th, 2025