Artists Space Network

Hello - my name is Lauren Raine.

I'm a professional visual artist, as well as writer and choreographer. I share the distinction, with many of my colleagues, of having been fortunate to live, work and evolve as in artist in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. And along with many of my fellows, I can no longer afford, due to gentrification, to live in any of these cities. Currently I live in Tucson, Arizona, where I'm beginning to see a familiar real estate blight, and artist's exodus, develop, even here. As I write, anyone can witness the half demolished corpse of the former Muse Community Arts Center on 6th and 5th Streets in Tucson, a once vital arts center that hosted artists studios, classrooms, and two theatres. She is now being torn down for the dubious progress of "Condo Lofts".

I even wrote an article about it that was published in the Tucson Citizen and elsewhere.( http://www.rainewalker.com/The%20Muse.htm )

I and a few friends are developing this Blog as a hopeful forum and resource for artists (and other "cultural creatives", once called Bohemians and Counter Culture) to share information about developing, protecting, and sustaining Artists Spaces, ie art studios, galleries, performance, salons and class venues, and perhaps most needed, live/work arts communities in the devastating face of what is occuring in contemporary real estate speculation, particularly in urban areas that once hosted innovative arts districts.

The fact is, we don't believe it's going to get any better. And in general, we don't believe we can wait for someone else to help us. We have to help ourselves by organizing and networking, something, admittedly, artists in particular have never been very good at. Or are we? Certainly, as I've researched the subject of communities, co-housing, co-ops, and CLT's (Community Land Trusts, rural and urban) - I see evidence that there are, indeed, many groups, organizations, and cities that have recognized the displacement of artists, and are doing quite a lot about it. I still cannot stand to drive by the sad sight of the Muse - but I'm encouraged that there are options, and discourse out there.

As artists, we're also culture makers. I'd like to affirm that truly innovative art is the soul of any given city, people, and civilization. And innovative artists, like innovators of all kinds, are often marginalized, and financially unsupported, by the majority culture. As we watch vital, synergistic artists districts (like Soho once was, or the Height Ashbury) become co-opted by "developers" and formula marketeers, we are watching the imaginative, and often most politically and creative sensitive, edge of our culture dissipate. I take the liberty of copying below excerpts from a brilliant article by Rebecca Solnit on the demise of the "Bohemian" districts of San Francisco, and her reflections on the greater significance of this loss. To read the article in it's entirety: http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/11solnit.html

Farewell, Bohemia
On Art, Urbanity, and Rent

by Rebecca Solnit

"... in the future there may be very few artists, at least artists whose origins are middle class, not because the urge stirred up during the postwar era has died down, but because the circumstances that make it possible to make art—or at least to live modestly with access to the center—are drying up..... On my least cheerful days, I imagine a nation in which those who have something to say have nowhere effective to say it. I went to Seattle to protest the meeting of the World Trade Organization, and where my bohemian friends can now afford to live is much farther from downtown than it used to be, when they lived in now-gentrified-by-computer-capital Capital Hill. .... It may be that artmaking will become like blue-collar American jobs—it’ll be relocated to places where it can be done more economically: to Marathon, Texas; Virginia City and Tuscarora, Nevada; Jerome and Bisbee, Arizona, just to name a few remote places to which artists have been migrating. Artists in small towns could become the equivalents of maquiladora workers, making goods for an economy in which they cannot afford to participate. It may be that cities have raised, so to speak, their admission fees—by obliging those who wish to stay in a city like San Francisco, for example, to join the dot.com economy, or an equally flush sector. But paying that fee—as Carol Lloyd almost admits—might mean abandoning the values and goals that brought one to the city in the first place and that perhaps made the city livelier, more tolerant and generous-spirited, than the suburbs and small towns one came from. Cities can probably keep their traditional appearance as they change fundamentally at heart, becoming as predictable, homogeneous, and politically static as the suburbs and gated communities. Those who can afford both to make art and to reside in the center will come with their advantages in place, and much good work might be produced; but work critiquing and subverting the status quo might become rarer just when we need it most. Art won’t die, but that longstanding urban relationship between the poor, the subversive, and the creative called bohemia will. For a long time it seemed that the death of cities would result from the decline of public space; but it may be that the disappearance of affordable private space in which public life is incubated will deliver the fatal blow. At least, it looks that way in San Francisco.

Notes1. "Spectre of Eviction in the Mission," San Francisco Examiner, November 29, 1999.
2. The eviction of American Indian Contemporary Arts was covered by the San Francisco Chronicle and, on December 15, by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which reported that the monthly rent will increase from $3,500 (AICA’s rent) to $10,000 (what the new tenant, Financial Interactive, will pay). "

l