The Arts and Culture Advisory Commission met at 4:00 PM in the City Council Chamber, Merced Civic Center, on Thursday, July 17, 2025. The commission unanimously approved an outreach plan for $75,000 in 2025/26 City Council-directed public art funding, received detailed status updates on several public art projects, and accepted requests for future agenda items.
You're ready, Chair. All right, let's go ahead and call the meeting to order with the uh Pledge of Allegiance, I believe, is first. Okay. Pledge of allegiance to the flag. United States of America to the Republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. All right. So do roll call. Okay. Agenda item C roll call, Commissioner Sabera. Oh, here. Zaragoza. Comarda? Here. Dran. Thompson. Vice Chair Dennis. Here. And Chair Hypes? Here. And ex officio members Rodriguez? Here. And Kucha. Here. Chair Hypes, I would like to remind the audience that if they wish to address the commission, they must submit a green request of speak form located at the podium in the back of the council chamber. Citizens can submit public comment to the commission electronically, no later than 1 p.m. on the day of the meeting. Comments received before the deadline will be sent to the commission and will be part of the record and will be mentioned as part of the public comment portion of the agenda. Material may be emailed to City Clerk at City of Merced.org. Any correspondence received after 1 p.m. will be distributed to the commission and retained for the official record. Agenda item D, public comment. Chair Hypes, the clerk's office did not receive any public comment. And there is nobody in the audience. Agenda item E, action items, E1, approval of community outreach plan for 2025-26 public art funding. Good afternoon, commissioners. So the arts, the future arts subcommittee, the future arts project subcommittee met last week and um talked about getting community input on what projects they'd like to see come out as RFPs or RFQs from this $75,000 that council has allocated to 2025-2026. So we are suggesting that we put together a um community outreach plan so we can ask people what they'd like to see as far as arts project goes from um murals, sculptures, performances, another photography event, those kinds of things. So we want feedback from the community. So the idea is to put a project page together on a site we call engage. And so we'll run some social media content, we'll get the commissioners to talk about the outreach. Um we'll do some videos, some reels, and we'll do that for 30 days so that we can come back in September with some really sought so the subcommittee will meet again, and then we'll come back to the commission in September to show the results of our efforts and then select from those projects so we can go to council at the end of September and or beginning of October, excuse me, with our with our um recommendations, and then we'll put together RFPs, RFQs, and then go out for bid. That's great. Oh, there we go. So I'm all go here. Oh, there we go. Okay, yeah. All right, so I saw uh Colton first and then Eddie U. So we'll start with Colton. Um thanks for that report, Jennifer.