A series of public meetings from end to end of the Napa Valley — including fast-growing American Canyon and the mountaintop community of Angwin — has given more than 150 people a voice in planning the county’s cultural future.

The final pair of “town hall” meetings, in Angwin and St. Helena, drew dozens of Upvalley artists, arts administrators and performers eager for a more culturally vibrant Napa County.

As in other communities surveyed by the Arts Council over the past few weeks, residents expressed the need for a public arts center to provide studio, gallery and performance space.

“We don’t have a home base,” said Noelle Peterson in St. Helena.

Thinking regionally, Bill Ryan said he seldom sees St. Helena neighbors when he and wife, Barbara, drive south to Napa’s Dreamweavers Theatre, which has a month-to-month lease in a building with an uncertain future.

“It’s very high-class community theater,” Ryan said. “We need a theater for them.”

Ryan also suggested that more high school teachers explore student “externships” at Dreamweavers, the only all-volunteer theater company in Napa County.

Partnerships between the worlds of art and education have been a recurrent theme at the Arts Council meetings.

Angwin resident and Pacific Union College employee Frank Federico said he’d like to see the school’s performance spaces used for more community events.

PUC instructor Tom Turner said the private college has a new photography studio with a 15-foot light box and “we want to do more and share our facilities.”

In St. Helena, the studios at Napa Valley College are “pretty well utilized” for art classes, said Jennifer Garden, curator at the Napa Valley Museum.

Publicity and marketing were widespread concerns, with residents throughout the county urging more arts coverage in local newspapers and asking for a published schedule of events.

St. Helena gallery owner Ira Wolk expressed surprise that so few people seemed aware that the Arts Council maintains a “Master Arts and Culture Calendar,” online at www.nvarts.org.

“It’s central to communication,” said Wolk, an Arts Council board member.

The group’s main Web site is www.artscouncilnapavalley.org, where staff have posted detailed minutes of each community meeting.

There are also snapshots from the town hall meeting tour, including a ballet-folklorico dance by Calistoga children and images of residents illustrating their most memorable arts experiences on a paper banner Arts Council staff have displayed at each stop.

The minutes and notes — typed by Arts Council director Michelle Williams, often at breakneck speed to keep up with the flow of ideas — reveal a thriving interest in the arts from end to end of Napa County.

They also make absorbing reading, studded with insights including the theory that artists are drawn to Calistoga because its main street, Lincoln Avenue, runs east-west instead of north-south as in other Napa cities.

Arts kiosks, expanded business sponsorships and a tax for the arts are just three of the practical ideas residents volunteered during the sessions moderated by Morrie Warshawski.

Arts Council Napa Valley will now take all of the comments and suggestions gathered at the six meetings, and craft a long-term plan for supporting the arts in each community and countywide.

Williams said she’ll bring the plan back to the public by the end of the year.