Shelter Island Arts Center takes shape: June Shatken spearheads creative organization

June Shatken is the founder of Shelter Island’s newest arts organization, Shelter Island Arts Center (SIAC), where she wants to tap into a creative force of nature.

“There’s some energy that happens when you’re in a group under the leadership of a qualified teacher,” she said. “People get ideas from each other, and there’s a special energy from people that come together to share creativity.”

Making that communal, creative energy available to anyone who wants it is the mission of SIAC and the reason that Shatken and four other local artists, Susan Schrott, Catherine Corry, Laurie Dolphin, and Connie Abate recently formed a board and created a 501c3 nonprofit organization.

Their timeline is ambitious. “We’re going to start putting out some programs, we hope in the spring,” said Ms. Shatken. Then comes fundraising, a website, and a logo. They have begun to look for a temporary home where they can hold classes.

From 2005 to 2015, before Ms. Shatken became a full-time Island resident, she owned The Brookside Art Studio in New Jersey where she painted, taught art and helped other artists find joy in their creativity and inspired many others to discover and pursue their own creative passions.

A long-time member of ARTSI (Artists of Shelter Island), Ms. Shatken has participated in many of that organization’s juried open studio tours held each August. She sees SIAC as going beyond ARTSI’s focus on the summertime studio tour, to providing a year-round center for creativity for writers, poets and musicians as well as the visual arts.

When COVID sent everyone home in 2020, Ms. Shatken started an online group called THE ARTS COMMUNITY OF SHELTER ISLAND (TACSI) to connect local artists. TACSI now has about 25 members who meet twice a month at members’ homes and studios to share projects they’re working on. She also teaches watercolor painting at the Shelter Island Senior Center on Tuesday mornings in a class that is open to young and old.

Ms. Shatken wants the SIAC to serve all the arts, not just drawing, painting, printmaking and sculpture.  She sees the potential for synergy between writers, poets, painters, and photographers. “You definitely need some solitude for creativity,” she said, but having a place for artists to meet, to display and discuss work, and to take and teach classes, “I think it would just really amplify people’s creativity.”