The Spy recently caught up with Leslie Prince Raimond to celebrate her 80th birthday with a retrospective conversation about her life promoting the arts and culture of Kent County.
It’s impossible to pack in five decades—a life’s work—in a ten-minute video, but one thing is for sure: if the arts are pathways to the human spirit, in Kent County they also lead to Leslie Prince Raimond and the legacy of her late husband, Vincent “Vince.”
Together, the Raimonds ushered in the foundation for the burgeoning art scene we experience today in Kent County.
“Vince always loved the arts of many levels. By the time he got his degree after WW2 at the university of Alaska he was overseeing all sorts of theatrical activities and encouraged friends who were artists and poets to continue their craft,” she says.
In the late 60s, Vince Raimond arrived in Chestertown and determined he wanted to promote the many artists he discovered throughout the county. With Leslie Raimond, then a recent graduate of Washington College, the two sought ways to underwrite and showcase art and theatre events.
At that time the Maryland Arts Council sought county representation and Vince seized the opportunity to form the Kent County Arts Council followed in the mid-70s by the founding of Actors Community Theatre who produced well over 100 plays often using the Washington College theatre during summer breaks.
Raimond went on to steward the Kent County Arts Council as its Executive Director, continuing through grants to support individual artists, groups, and special projects like the renovation of the G.A.R. Charles Sumner Hall and helping with the C.V Starr Center’s “Oral History Workshop Project: The Civil Rights Movement on Maryland’s Eastern Shore,” to name a few.
In 2018, Raimond passed the arts leadership role to John Schratwieser who will continue the KAC foundational mission as the Kent Cultural Alliance. As fate would have it, the Alliance’s new office and artists workshops and gallery will be housed in the renovated arts building across from the Post Office and dedicated as the Vincent and Leslie Prince Raimond Center.
But never fear. Raimond is always near a new enterprise, both as an advisor to KCA, and working on her own projects.
This interview begins with a description of Vince Raimond’s founding of Kent County Arts Council and touches on a few of her many roles as Kent County’s pioneer of the arts movement that has come to define Chestertown along with her observations on the cultural significance of Black gospel music, Chestertown’s link to the “Chitlin Circuit,” and the day the Freedom Riders came to town.
The video is approximately eleven minutes in length.
Alexander says
Ms Raimond is our jewel and we are most fortunate.
The Kent County community will always be indebted and grateful to her.
Thank you Ms Raimond
Barbara in den Bosch says
Thanks for all you have done, Leslie! The Hundred Voice Choir was my introduction to Chestertown, for which I thank you and Sylvia. It brought me the joy of singing Gospel and the beginnings of many understandings. Thanks.