Sawtooth Center for Visual Art

The Sawtooth Center for Visual Art [3], an arts education facility located in downtown Winston-Salem [4] in a renovated 1910 textile mill with a distinctive jagged roofline, serves the Triad community (Winston-Salem [4], High Point [5], and Greensboro [6]) as a place for people to learn about and work creatively in painting, ceramics, fibers, glass, graphics, photography, metals, and wood. The building also has three art galleries featuring presentations by local artists, traveling exhibitions, and national juried shows. Founded in 1945 as one of the country's first community visual arts schools, the center was purchased by the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company [7] and donated to the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County [8] for adaptation to community use. Formal opening of the center in 1945 included such divergent attractions as Zsa Zsa Gabor [9], the Glenn Miller Band, Preservation Hall musicians from New Orleans, and the Ink Spots. The Sawtooth Center for Visual Art is part of a cultural complex designed to revitalize downtown Winston-Salem.