Lisa Rees - MAG Board Member Recruitment

Speaker: Lisa Rees, MAG Board President

Lisa Rees: My name is Lisa Rees. I've lived in Milton for almost 18 years and while I don't have any art hanging at the Milton Artists' Guild, I definitely do appreciate art and I like to buy it. I also like to take the workshops at MAG. Just to show you real quick, I made this, I made this, and this, and I learned how to play the Ukulele. So to me, MAG is just a gem and I just love to be part of it.

Lisa Rees: Lucky me. I am MAG's Board President. I became President back in October of last year, I believe. It's been really a lot of great fun meeting everybody. I also serve on a lot of committees. I'm the Chair for Fundraising Committee where we do fundraising events to raise money to keep MAG's doors open and to pay our fabulous staff. I also am on the Finance Committee because I have a strong financial background. So I do that as well with our CFO, Ellen and Caitlin and also on the Events Committee. We've really stepped it up this year to have lots of different events and themes and it's been really great to be working side by side with all of our fabulous member volunteers.

Lisa Rees: I don't have a favorite thing about MAG because everything involving MAG is my favorite thing, but if I guess if I had to choose a few, it would be I'm a mentor with Milton Mentors and we have workshops that we do together at the gallery. Nothing makes me happier to do the art, the art I showed you at the beginning. Those are actually projects I did with my mentee. So I would say that going to MAG and participating in those mentoring art workshops are probably my favorite thing. The second favorite thing, I think it was Art and Stroll. It was our first time. We did it last year and just to see the artists and the community visiting and how much they loved visiting all these artists. It was just really feel-good thing. It was great to have all of the artists have their wonderful works displayed for the world to see. There's a lot of great things that are happening and it's really hard to choose a few, but those would be my few.

Lisa Rees: We offer memberships to MAG and you don't have to be an artist to be a member. Becoming a member means that you support the arts and that you love MAG and you want to keep the doors open, so that's one way of membership is just supporting MAG, the other is if you're an artist. We're a non-juried gallery, meaning that anybody can display their art and that's part of our mission - is that everybody can be an entrepreneur in art. So we offer a lot of support because we have so many members already, we have about 170 members. What it does is it offers you a community of artists as well as a place that you can display your art for the public to purchase. And we offer ways of support for you to hang your art in public places as well as to participate in workshops around how to be an entrepreneur, bringing your art business to the next level. On our website we will give you space to display your art. It will link to your website if you have one, but if not, we offer you that marketing and support. There's lots and lots of reasons to join MAG, but really it is about just having wonderful artists who come together to support each other.

Lisa Rees: The bylaws state that we're allowed to have 11 board members. We haven't been able to reach that number yet, but we're really hopeful that we can get more people on the board. A reason to be on the board is that you play an integral part in planning the future of Milton Artists' Guild: where will we be in a year, three years, five years, ten years from now. By being on the board, you have your ideas and you can bring them and to say what is your vision for our future. We also need different talents. We don't all have to be the same. We have different backgrounds. So mine is more finance and strategic planning where somebody else, maybe marketing. What we'll do is we'll work with you to leverage your strengths to bring them to the board so that you can focus on what you love to do best.