The Oneida County Youth Bureau will be sponsoring their 6th Annual Sidewalk Art Contest from July 7th to July 11th this year. The contest is open to Oneida County youth ages 5 through 18 in four (4) age specific categories; 5-7 years of age, 8-10 years old, 11-13 years old, and 14-18 years old. This initiative offers local youth a special opportunity to come out and show their creative talents to their peers and their communities.
The details are as follows:
- Individual agencies, cities, towns and villages hold their own contests the week of July 7th through July 11th ; youth should inquire to see if their agency, city, town or village participates. If not, youth should contact the Oneida County Youth Bureau at 798-5027 to see how they can participate.
- The agencies, cities, towns and villages choose their winners in each age category.
- The agency, city, town and village winners compete in the finals competition the following Thursday, July 17th (rain date July 18th) on the sidewalks in front of and around Pratt at Munson-Williams-Proctor on State Street in Utica; competition begins at 10:30 and the youth have 30 minutes to draw a positive image on a single sidewalk slab.
- Medals are given to the top three (3) finishers in each age category and all the finalists are invited to a free tour of Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute after the competition.
- Last year 966 youth county-wide participated and 115 competed the following week.
The Daily Yonder has an interesting article on what is being called the "creative class" by the Economic Research Services group. ERS researchers identified creative occupations listed in the 2000 Census and refined their selection criteria for use with the 2011 American Communities five year estimates (the fine print of the study’s methodology and the data itself are here, courtesy of Tim Wojan and David McGranahan). Then they identified the top quarter of U.S. counties that had the largest percentage of creative-class workers.
If you go to this webpage you can click on the map to explore the data county by county. Green locations are nonmetro counties in the top 25 percent of creative-class employment. Gray locations are metro counties in the top 25 percent (there are 568 of those, according to the ERS study). The map shows the number of creative-class jobs and the percentage of workers in creative professions. The map also lists the number and percentage of workers who are professional artists – a special category of creative-class workers that researcher Richard Florida, who developed the creative-class thesis, associates with new-firm start ups and high-tech specialization. Below are screen shots of Herkimer and Oneida Counties creative class information.
Herkimer County
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Oneida County
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