One year ago, just prior to officially taking over the role as director of the Haywood County Arts Council, Kay Waldrop set forth a goal.

“I think right now one of the first things is to increase the visibility of the organization,” she said.

Now, with a new Arts Council gallery and office on Main Street in Waynesville set to open its doors one year to the day of Waldrop taking office; a newly organized volunteer guild; newly forged partnership with the state’s international dance festival Folkmoot USA; and a refocused effort to feature multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary art forms, one could say Waldrop has accomplished much of what she set out to do.

“It’s been busy,” Waldrop says with a laugh.

Before the move to Main Street, the Arts Council languished out of sight and perhaps at times out of mind. The council’s office and art gallery located off Main Street on the ground floor of a building shared by a prominent orthodontist often was lost in the shuffle of wire-mouthed pre-teens and mini-vans passing by its door.

The “Little Gallery,” as it was called, was less of a gallery than it was rooms with some art hung on the walls, the office just another one of those rooms. The lighting was bad, the walls worn, and all in all, the gallery failed to attract as many visitors as its more commercial but better located peers on Waynesville’s Main Street.

On the first Friday of each month — when the Waynesville Gallery Association holds evening gallery strolls — council board members would move the “gallery open” sign half a block up the road to the intersection with Main Street, hoping to draw foot traffic down the hill to Church Street.

When the building was sold — the Arts Council only rented its space — the council seized the opportunity to move out and up to a central Main Street location amongst the likes of art gallery and pottery studio Twigs and Leaves, the Jeweler’s Workbench and popular dining and shopping conglomerate Towne Square, Waldrop said. The move not only gives the council more space — nearly doubling the size of the gallery — but places it in the thick of Main Street’s foot traffic.

“That’s the biggest accomplishment of the year,” Waldrop said.

In order to keep the new gallery staffed 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, the council is relying on its new volunteer guild — a fancy name for a group of people who are willing to reliably contribute their time and efforts to the council’s mission. The guild also builds the council’s ability to form new connections within the community. New connections mean new ideas and possibly new monies.

One such new connection exists between the arts council and Folkmoot USA.

“People are always getting us confused anyway, so we thought we might as well capitalize on that,” Waldrop said.

Folkmoot and the Arts Council are standalone organizations, but rather understandably members of the general public often think the dance festival is an Arts Council project. Willing to share the limelight, first-year Folkmoot Executive Director Jayme Cooper agreed to partner up and create a tote bag bearing both the Folkmoot and Arts Council logos.

In addition, the Arts Council has a found a way to mix art and cultural exchange as part of this year’s International Festival Day on July 30. International Festival Day is an Arts Council event, and its volunteers recruit exhibitors and jury their work. This year the council will be running a station where kids can make their own “passport” then visit each of Folkmoot’s visiting dance companies to make a native craft and get their passport stamped.

This multi-cultural approach is something Waldrop hopes to carry over into the Arts Council’s general offerings by tapping into the local African-American and Latino communities.

While diversifying culturally, the council will also looking to broaden its artistic focus by offering more opportunities for non-visual and 3-D artists such as singers and sculptors versus painters and photographers.

But all this isn’t to say the Arts Council hasn’t had its downturns over the past year. The floods caused by Hurricanes Frances and Ivan nearly cancelled the Atlanta Ballet’s annual performance at Haywood Community College.

“It was completely a financial wash,” Waldrop said.

And the annual Halloween Party — a sort of anyone who’s anyone affair traditionally held on the top floor of the Arts Council’s old Church Street home — was cancelled when building owners put their foot down.

“There were several things that really crushed us at the end of the year,” Waldrop said.

These days Waldrop is more optimistic and stands behind all the Arts Council’s ventures.

“I’ve been at everything we do,” she said.