Mill Valley honors five creative achievers this year at a reception, dinner and program on Sunday, Oct. 18, at the Mill Valley Community Center. Ahead of the ceremony, each Milley Awards winner spoke with the Briefing about the places that shaped them, their work and where the town's arts scene goes next. Meet Genna Panzarella (visual arts), Valerie Andrews (literary arts), Brian Narelle (performing arts) and Sharon Valentino (contributions to the arts community).
Sharon Valentino, recognized for her contributions to the arts community. Valentino is serving her second term as a Mill Valley Arts Commissioner, a role that runs through February 2029. (Photo courtesy of Daniel Patrick)
Sharon Valentino’s clearest sense of place isn't a gallery. "Old Mill Park is, to me, true, unfiltered art," she told the Briefing. "The redwoods, the creek, the changing light, the sounds of nature. It all reminds us that beauty doesn't have to be created. Sometimes we simply have to be present enough to see it." She draws there herself. As a therapist, she said, she has sent patients to the park to relieve stress and reconnect with themselves.
Ask her about her work on the arts commission and she pulls back the curtain. "People see the finished work, but they rarely see the extraordinary amount of time, persistence, negotiation, fundraising and collaboration that makes it possible," she said. "A work of public art can take months or even years to bring into being."
Her hope for the next decade comes with a condition attached: growth that's also careful. "I'd want Mill Valley's arts scene to be more vibrant, more visible, more encouraging and much better funded, but also thoughtful about how, where and how much art is placed," she said. "The arts aren't an ornament to community life. They're a necessity."
Valerie Andrews, a promise made on Mt. Tam in 1976
Literary arts honoree Valerie Andrews. (Photo courtesy of Daniel Patrick)
Andrews has built a career on the question of home, as a journalist, magazine editor and workshop facilitator whose online magazine Reinventing Home grew into the anthology Sanctuary: The Inner Life of Home, with contributors including Jean Shinoda Bolen, Mary Reynolds Thompson and Phil Cousineau. Her most recent book, The Story of Home: Tales of Longing and Belonging, draws on myth, politics and the personal to ask where and how we live.
The pull toward Mill Valley started decades before she moved here. "Running on Mt. Tam with George Leonard and interviewing Michael Murphy about The Future of the Body for my first book, The Psychic Power of Running, in 1976, I fell in love with the redwoods, Stinson Beach and the whole California scene," she told the Briefing. "When I went back to New York, I promised myself I'd one day live in Mill Valley."
What people get wrong about writing, she said, is that it's easy. She likes to quote novelist Peter De Vries on what it actually takes: "You just sit in front of the typewriter until blood forms on your forehead."
Her hope for the next ten years reads like a checklist of what already makes the town work. "Vibrant, expanding, inclusive," she said. "A continuing source of classical music, jazz, improv classes, art galleries, Mountain Plays, MTC theatre, Mill Valley Film Festival, sidewalk art, and let's add tango classes in the square!"
Brian Narelle, animator of Sesame Street and mornings on Cascade
Performing arts honoree Brian Narelle. (Photo courtesy of Daniel Patrick)
Narelle's award recognizes an Emmy-winning career as a writer, actor, puppeteer and animator. His credits include 'The Adventures of Thelma Thumb' for Sesame Street and supervising animation on Lucasfilm's 'Twice Upon a Time.' He also co-wrote the Discovery Channel series 'Bingo and Molly' with his wife, Robin Goodrow.
But ask him what shaped him and he goes local. "I used to walk up Cascade to the waterfall every morning, sing to the forest, then head down to Korty Films with coffee from the Depot," he wrote. "Paradise and Hollywood. It doesn't get better than that."
His hope for the next decade is smaller and more personal: that the Depot stays what it was, a gathering spot for the creatives who once rallied there each morning, a scene the late cartoonist Robert Gumpertz used to draw.
Genna Panzarella, chalk art built to vanish in seconds
Visual arts honoree Genna Panzarella. (Photo courtesy of Daniel Patrick)
Panzarella has spent five decades in Mill Valley making art built to vanish. Her chalk paintings on asphalt, "street canvases" she's created across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Italy, Israel and Hong Kong, are gone almost as soon as they're finished, worn away by rain, wind and foot traffic. For years, visitors to San Rafael's Youth In Arts Street Painting Festival watched her work in progress, and Gary Yost's video "Mountains Made of Chalk, Fall into the Sea, Eventually" captures her narrating that impermanence herself.
The vanishing act is the point, not the cost. "Street painting needs a lot of preparation and planning to be drawn quickly. It is often seen for only a few seconds by passersby," she told the Briefing. "I want to provide something new, never thought about before, that will capture their attention and that takes a considerable amount of time and creativity."
Her hope for Mill Valley's arts scene in a decade is simple: more of what's already here. "Mill Valley has a huge population of creative people," she said. "I would like to see our community continue their support of the arts and provide even more opportunities to showcase the talents of our town."
