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06/29/2005: "Where do Artists' Live?"
Rembrandt lived and worked in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, Picasso and Braque on Montemartre near Sacre Coeur, and the Abstract Expressionists in Greenwich Village and the East Village because it was cheap and near where everything was going on. I always find it interesting to hear about how other artists manage to survive and succeed. My brother, also a painter, has arranged an exhibition of our work at 33 Collective in Chicago. The Collective is an interesting space. It is truly a collective of half a dozen artists on the South Side of Chicago. The South side has recently begun to poke its head up above decades of poverty, corruption and violence. I’ll talk a little later in this blog about how artists help gentrify run down areas of cities-- an aspect of the value of the arts that city planners, bankers, investors and politicians rarely tune into. We are a valuable motivating factor that is often sadly misunderstood, neglected and under-valued. Perhaps it is our own fault in that we don’t learn how to talk to those who count when it comes to money and other practicalities. But to some extent they bear half the blame for not being bright enough to see what it is we do so well. In many respects we, that is the artistic community, are an important civilizing factor. That is part of what culture is...a civilizing blanket, an attitude, that covers society...or not.
The artists of 33 Collective have studio space for themselves in a building (the Zhou B. Art Center) owned by two artists from China who have made quite a reputation for themselves. The collective operates a gallery for their own work as well as the work of other artists they like. There is a very small fee for an exhibition (of course they pay much more to be members then we guest exhibitors do. Even on the South Side of Chicago rents are not that cheap.) The fee covers certain expenses including invitations. We’re talking only a couple hundred dollars. They put out a press release and list each show in Chicago newspapers. The shows are fairly short, only two weeks long, but then some of the work is re-hung in the back rooms for another two weeks so that the audience for the next show also gets to see some of the previous work as well as the work of the artists in the collective. Actually that is not a bad protocol. The exhibitions have also been frequented by other commercial galleries. The last artist to exhibit, I am told, was picked up by one of the local Chicago galleries after his show.
About 33 Collective Gallery
33 Collective is an artist owned and artist run cooperative gallery located in the 3rd Floor of the Zhou B. Center, 1029 W. 35th Street in Chicago. The gallery focuses on established and emerging artists. 33 Collective Gallery has openings on the 3rd Friday of every month in their Bridgeport location, just one-mile west of US Cellular Field. For gallery hours or more information please contact the gallery.
Website: "http://www.33collective.com/"
33 Collective Gallery
Sergio Gomez
phone: 708-837-4534
Info on the Zhou Brothers and their Art Center can be found at:
http://www.zhoub.com/
We each have about 25 works in the show making it a fairly large exhibition. Many of my works are smaller drawings. Many of Tim’s are smaller color studies from landscape. Tim wrote the statement and press release. Tim is only 4 years my junior and has two degrees (a BFA from Kansas City Art Inst and an MA from Tulsa University) but has just returned to get an MFA at Northern Illinois Univ. at Dekalb so he can begin teaching. Tim has been painting for nearly as long as I have but because he also has a family he has been earning a living as a graphic artist for about the last 20 years. I taught him how to do a simple paste-up in 1985 before computers took over the graphics industry. From that one lesson he taught himself how to design, introduced computers to his first real art job and has made a career of it from there so he could continue painting. I know there has been a lot of discussion about this being somehow illegitimate but many rather well known and successful painters have done the same thing like Ben Shahn, Warhol, Guston, de Kooning only a little as he preferred to paint houses cause it paid better at the time! As soon as their paintings began to sell they quit their day jobs. One of my former color students is quite well known. Inka Essenhigh was doing some computer work for a fabric design firm in New York after she finished her MFA at Sch. of Visual Arts if I remember correctly. She was eventually picked up by Mary Boone after a succession of successful smaller shows around the city. She is now selling quite well in the U.S. and England and is represented in major collections around the world. Being smart and talented doesn’t hurt either. Everybody has to do what they have to do to get by and get ahead in this business.
6-11-08
The opening night of Observed and Staged: Metaphorical Terrains at 33 Collective was hot. The building is still being renovated and heat built up inside the large brick warehouse all day and only slowly dissipated as the night cooled due to a brick wind off the lake. Every so often I had to come down stairs both to smoke and cool off. By the end of the night I smelled like a water buffalo. ShanZuo and DaHuang Zhou, the artists (brothers) who own the building, dropped by around 8 pm, took a look at the show, expressed their appreciation for the work, exchanged a few formalities and then disappeared up into their own studio on the top floor. Slowly a small crowd began to congregate, mostly other artists either from NIU, the neighborhood which has begun to sprout a number of local galleries, and friends of the collective or that my brother and I had invited. I can’t say there were any collectors (I have only one in Chicago but they are not in any position to buy at the moment. In this the show was less than successful...that is that no collectors showed or purchased. It was also the first day of the Chicago Blues festival and when I realized that we would be in competition with such a huge event I knew that I would have to look for other benefits from this show. The first being that I met a goodly number of local artists and found a new art community beginning of the South Side with the locus being the Zhou B. Art Center. The Zhou Brothers intend the facility to house a coffee house and large exhibition space for traveling exhibitions and I suppose their own work on the main floor. The second floor is intended for a summer arts program like one in Strasbourg that they taught at a number of years ago. In fact there was a visiting/resident Austrian painter on the third floor who had studied at the Strasbourg Art Institute. The third floor in general has studio spaces leased to individual or groups of artists like 33 Collective. There are a few spaces still vacant if anyone in the Chicago area is interested. And the 4th floor is the Zhou Brothers studio as I mentioned.
So I spoke to everyone who was interested in either my or my brothers work as did he. He of course already knew many of the visitors. So it was a good night. While not a commercial success the show cost me very little, I got another chance to exhibit with my brother and now I’m back in touch with some of what is happening in Chicago.
6-14-08
As I mentioned above artists help gentrify run down areas of cities simply because they have no other options. Soho is maybe the most well known example of this in recent history. Chelsea is now the commercial center of the arts in New York. However the Bowery is now the talk of Manhattan where property values have doubled, tripled and even quadrupled in the last few years. Williamsburg then Greenpoint, in that order, are probably the next to immerge onto the scene because prices in Manhattan have sky rocketed. The artists (writers, actors, musicians, dancers and visual artists) have been congregating there for about 10 years or more and now a small number of galleries are somewhat established in Williamsburg and beginning to pop up in Greenpoint. I’ve been involved with or aware of several emerging art districts around the country over the last 20+ years; Boston‘s Newberry St., Columbus Ohio‘s Short North area, Cincinnati's Over the Rhine district, Chicago’s Milwaukee Avenue Coyote Walk, and Tulsa Oklahoma‘s near north side have all had an impact on the cities where they emerged. I even got to see what was happening in the more creative part of Dresden Germany as unification began to have its effect. Much of what I saw was actually the result of the more depressed cold war era when artists simply had to hang together to survive. They were ready once things opened up and money began to flow. It was interesting to see a snippet of Dresden’s artists’ incentive as I have always understood that the arts have played a traditional part in city development in Europe for centuries.
City planners and politicians rarely tune into these events until they already have a pretty good head of steam. However once they grasp the fact that money can be made they jump on the board and soon the artists get bumped off the main track. We mostly hear about complaints as to how a tiny amount of NEA money is spent on offensive art yet the internet was established by tax payer money as a military and scientific cross fertilization tool. But now that the World Wide Web is firmly established it has ultimately underwritten the porn industry like a dog’s blood underwrites a tick. The porn industry is so lucrative that now it keeps the Internet afloat as the biggest winner after the dot.com crash. It makes the small amount of money the NEA spends look like a grain of sand in a desert. Yet what critics don’t get is that artists are a valuable motivating factor and we are underused and under-funded because what we do is a little too far below eye level and we don‘t particularly need big bucks to do it--although money wouldn‘t hurt much. We’re already used to paper cuts.
I live but a 30 minute walk from Downtown Columbus, the art college, a 20 minute bike ride to the Short North area. I have an old house with a two story garage out back for a studio. It would have cost me the same for an apartment and a separate studio space in one of the warehouses just east of downtown. And I have a little green around me. What you can’t see in the photo that opens this blog is that I’m really in the city. Right now in Columbus the Short North is a screaming success story-- for the city if not for artists. Artists moved into skid row on High St. between downtown (just over the tracks from downtown center) and Ohio State University. The area was an embarrassment to the city into the late 70’s with its winos sleeping it off on the sidewalks, skuzzy bars, greasy spoons, liquor stores and resale shops. Because downtown and OSU were the two bragging points for the city every visitor had to pass through the short north skid row to get from one to the other. It took more than 20 years for the artists to establish themselves, organize a few studios and collective galleries like Acme Art Co. and Roy-G-Biv (also a not-for-profit.) About 5 or six years after things got off the ground a few new commercial galleries and more high-end antique shops along with artists from all over the city began a gallery hop every 1st Saturday of the month. It was a good time to be an artist in Columbus. The openings were fun, you got to meet just about every serious artist in town along with the dilatants and wannabees and the press was paying attention because they could do just about every show in town in one night. It wasn’t long before the place was so crowded at every hop that you had to park 5 to 6 blocks away and walk to the area. Soon landlords began raising rents while boutiques, modern furniture stores, and high-end restaurants moved in drawing an even more upscale crowd. Utrecht Artist Supply has even established a store in the Short North thereby proclaiming it a bona fide art center. About 10 years ago local entrepreneurs tore down a whole block of beautiful old buildings with apartments upstairs and street level storefronts to put in new upscale apartments, now condos, and raised the rents even higher guaranteeing that those pesky artists couldn‘t afford to trash the place up.
Sadly the art has taken a nosedive devolving into poster and commercial print galleries and those awful furniture store, starving artist style galleries. We used to call this sentimental drech “Big Eyed Girl with a Tear” art if it was figurative and ‘sofa’ art if it was abstract. These franchises hang slick looking well-framed crap. It is always sad to see that those young upwardly mobile professionals with college degrees never managed to grasp art with any depth. Who was it said you can never underestimate the taste and intelligence of the American public? (I’m sure a few will find my comments offensive but then I am offended by having to comment on it at all.) Few want original art. They’d rather buy art that they’ve seen before either in other stores or the cheap ads in Art News, Art in America and American Artist magazines or worse.
There are only a few of the original galleries left in the Short North. Both Acme and Roy-G-Biv have managed to hold on but for how much longer I can’t say. The Columbus Art League established themselves on the Short North at some point. They are one of the few galleries worth visiting these days. This group is actually one of the oldest arts organizations in the city going back to the 1880’s and now called the Ohio Art League. Begun as a small society of rich wives of local businessmen, they get the credit for starting the Columbus Museum and the Columbus College of Art and Design (formerly the Columbus Art School). For that we can thank them. Their husbands would not have spent good money on something as frivolous as the arts. Of that I’m quite sure. The Ohio Art League seems to be stable if not flourishing. I don’t know any artist who still lives on High Street although a few may have managed to buy houses in the neighborhood before the boom. But the area is so successful that the city built a Hockey stadium only a mile away. They realized that this whole impetus had revitalized the downtown area which had pretty much begun to roll up it’s streets at 5pm every work week as soon as office workers split for their suburban hidey holes. The South side of Downtown used to be an old brewery and sausage manufacturing area. German village had also begun to hit it’s stride since the Short North began to blossom (again due in part to many artists and creative others who saw the small German style brick buildings as having a certain uniqueness of style and affordability and moved there in the mid 60’s) I think the success of the two areas are connected because they are both near downtown and required a certain creatively courageous kind of participant to weather the long dry period before they began to prosper. A number of artists who got in early have managed to hang on and prosper among the new million dollar properties. Some of those properties were selling for between 7 and 12,000 dollars in the mid 60’s. Of course many had to be rehabbed along the way as older buildings always do.
There is also a new offensive to clean up the Ohio State University strip along the northern stretch of High Street -- maybe they will eventually call it the Long North (kinda like Soho and Noho). Unlike in the short north where the artistic trend and theme was followed at least for a number of years revitalization of the Long North is being done in a different way. Instead of using the university strip attitude deeply established over the last century they are just buying up everything they can, like school yard bullies, tearing down businesses that had become traditional icons in the area and are pretty much starting all over as if to say “this is filthy and we‘re gonna clean it (and by reference “you college students”) all up and then you‘ll thank us for it.” It’s gonna be one giant strip mall! There are no plans for art galleries as far as I can tell. And if they do put in galleries they will probably be the ‘Big Eyed Tear’ type. I have a feeling students will find another area to hang out (in fact I‘ve already seen evidence of this in some of the surrounding neighborhoods. University students usually come from the burbs and often tend towards something more culturally exotic then the white bread world they came from! And that is exactly what local entrepreneurs are envisioning, the same white bread world that they are known for franchising all over the country and even around the world. As soon as the slick and ubiquitous and often overpriced and nutritionless franchises move out for lack of business it will eventually regain it’s college strip patina and the used record stores, antique clothing and furniture stores, bars and hangouts where students talk and listen to music will move back in. Nature conquers all in the end.
The artistic result of all this is that the city prospers but now there is no central location where artists can find each other, exhibit, build an audience and thrive. In this recent artistic diaspora we’ve spread out all over the city finding cheap rents or property and galleries where we can. There is no longer a nexus or pivot point from which we can get a little leverage to move ourselves along. An enterprising city counsel might begin an initiative to create a few focused incentive grants, say a few grand each to go to a certain part of town that needs cleaning up. You know, enough to buy a few gallons of paint, fix a bit of plumbing upgrade some electrical, build or tear out some walls and put up some track lights to make a gallery space or two. A couple of willing landlords who will take a tax break to keep rents low for a few years so that artists can maintain long enough to be effective would help as well. It is a long-term project though. They tried something like it once with an old warehouse district (they called it the Loft District) but the place was already too expensive and rents went through the roof before artists even heard about it. My friend Steve Burkart and I had shared a studio there for about 8 years before he left for NY. I got run out a few months later as the rents began to rise. I’m almost embarrassed to say that for about 1600sq. ft. of space (800 sq. ft each) we paid only about $175 a month (about $85 each plus occasional utilities) through the 90’s. Even our lovely landlords couldn’t resist the money and I don’t really blame them.
Reclaiming an area from ruin is a long-term investment. Knowing such an endeavor has to be carefully thought out and is a 20 or even a 30-year project means that: A) This artist centered model won’t work in some parts of town as they are already in too good a condition financially. B ) that the right area would interfere very little with the cities most recent endeavors until they were pretty well secure. There would be little lag in the progress of the city this way as one area reaches maturity the next is waiting in the wings in say 20 year cycles. This also allows smaller investors to begin getting in on the ground level--including the artists themselves who are usually shit-out-a-luck once the boom is heard. By focusing on a specific run down area that has potential because it is contiguous to existing areas that are slowly coming up, areas that look like they will be valuable in a few decades. I can think of one in particular here in Columbus . I’m sure you can think of an area in your local that could use a facelift as well.
I was included in an exhibition once before in Chicago on Milwaukee Ave. It was an interesting arrangement. An investor who bought loft buildings had a young man who first installed a gallery/coffee shop on the main floor and began organizing shows of local artists. This began to draw in the art public while the investor began renovating the upper floors. By the time the apartments or condos were complete a potential client base had already been attracted and the spaces went very quickly. They would move on to the next endeavor and do it all over again. Now I’m not used to investors paying attention to the arts in quite this manner. I was impressed but never got to meet him. I heard other stories about investors in New York doing more or less the same thing working with local curators and artists. In fact the Show in Queens I participated in sounds quite similar.
This entrepreneurial way of thinking about the arts should make investors and other capitalists feel much better about the arts as it fits their way of thinking better than NEA grants and other initiatives deemed to be too socialistic. (Don’t get me wrong, I think the NEA is quite important to the higher loftier place of art in the larger culture of the nation. I’m just saying that not every businessman, alderman or working stiff gets that.) it only takes a little willingness to talk to the artists themselves as ditzy, dissident, contrary and impractical as they may seem. Take them seriously and you’ll soon find out that many of them actually have a viable vision...but the greed has to wait a little while. Never fear. Greed will get its due eventually. It always does. Even artists, no matter how altruistically and idealistically they portray themselves, want to make money by what they do.
View my page at:
http://www.absolutearts.com/portfolios/w/walterking
