Welcome and starting up

I see we named this blog "Ivy's Place." That just means we started it and we had to have a name for it, and I'll be writing in it a lot. I hope to see responses and suggestions from all arts lovers, as well as those who don't exactly apply that term to themselves.
The url, too, has the words "sumterarts" in it, and that will be the main topic, although I don't want to confine myself to Sumter. Like The Item itself, I believe in the news pyramid -- here, the base is local arts news, topped by the regional, the state, the South, the nation and so on. I hope to get into some topics we don't normally write about in the paper -- close up looks at the philosophies of local artists, new things they're trying, old techniques they've mastered -- and so on. Visual and performing arts may be the primary focus, but my personal philosophy about the arts is that there is an art to many things, most things, even.
I figure that leaves us wide open to discussion.