From the Columbia Daily Tribune — Planting new seeds at Orr St. (spotlighting Mary Kroening)
Last Updated on Monday, 16 August 2010 07:09 Written by spence Monday, 16 August 2010 07:09
Barbara Leonhard practices tai chi in the hallway of Orr Street Studios. Mary Kroening took over the role as director of the center this summer after Tracy Lane stepped down to take over as executive director at Ragtag Cinema. Photo by John Darkow.
“Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?” the old nursery rhyme begins.
As Orr Street Studios hopes to grow as a downtown destination for artists and cultural consumers, responsibility for tending the patch has been handed to a gardener named Mary. But she’s no contrary cultivator. Instead, Mary Kroening possesses a rather accommodating disposition as well as a keen eye for promotion, an eye she has trained on expanding the way Columbians envision the artistic greenhouse with which she has been entrusted.
Kroening became Orr Street director this summer when Tracy Lane departed to captain Ragtag Cinema. The transition was a natural one; after beginning her Hidden Treasures Botanical Tours business in 2006 — an outfit that organizes specialty garden tours everywhere from Costa Rica to New Zealand, the United Kingdom to South Africa — Kroening wanted an office outside the walls of her home. “The ambience, the inviting atmosphere and the people really lured me” to Orr Street, she said and after a waitlisted year, Kroening moved in. She served as a contributing member, throwing more than two cents’ worth of business savvy and marketing advice into strategic discussions, lessons learned from her entrepreneurial efforts, from her former role coordinating the Missouri Master Gardener program at the University of Missouri and working with the Columbia Image Awards, a project she now chairs.
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