artists space network

The Alliance of Artists Communities

2006-07-10T22:13:00.000-07:00

Here's a tidy bit of information to followup, or chase down, thanks to the kind and dedicated people at the ALLIANCE OF ARTISTS COMMUNITIES. If you haven't visited their site, or better yet, purchased their book to study at length, do. They're the most comprehensive resource for residencies and artists retreats in the U.S.
The Alliance of Artists Communities

255 South Main Street Providence, RI 02903

Phone: (401) 351-4320

http://www.artistcommunities.org

ORGANIZATIONS PROVIDING LIVE/WORK SPACE TO ARTISTS:

Artist Help Network - National listing of live/work spaces, co-ops, and resources
national
Artist Relocation Program (Paducah, KY) - “The Soho of the South”
KY
Artist Trust - Resources for artists, including listings of live/work spaces, in Washington State
WA
Arts Habitat of Edmonton - Provides safe, affordable and appropriate live/work space for artists in Albert, Canada
AB
Artspace Cleveland - Affordable live/work spaces for artists in Cleveland
OH
Artspace Projects - A nonprofit creating spaces for artists and their families throughout the US
national
Bates Art Center - Boston center with live/work space, professional support, and exhibit space
MA
Chashama - A nonprofit group that provides free and subsidized space to visual and performing artists through the Accessing Real Estate for the Arts (AREA) Program.
NY
Chicago Mutual Housing Network - Resource for co-ops throughout Chicago
IL
Community Housing Resource Group - Affordable artists housing in Provincetown.
MA
Harmony - Studios for rent along Highway 1 in San Louis Obispo County
CA
Keen Development Corporation - New England live/work space development
New England
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council - Providing studio space to selected New York artists.
NY
Open Square - Converted industrial center in Holyoke, MA, which includes artists space
MA
Peekskill Artist District - Affordable live/work space in downtown Peekskill
NY
SurrealEstates, Ink. - Artist live/work project in Sacramento, CA
CA
Troy Artist District - Planned community for the arts, artists, and live/work space in Troy, NY
NY
The Warehouse Studios, Inc - Planned affordable studio space for artists and musicians in Columbia, MO.

Paducah, Kentucky - Artists Relocation Program

2006-07-01T14:29:00.000-07:00

This post will be in haste, as I prepare for a long drive to the Bay Area. I still have friends there, but the "artists warehouse" is rapidly becoming an endangered species.

Just wanted to post information about the "ARTIST'S RELOCATION PROGRAM" of Paducah, Kentucky. The powers that be in Paducah came up with the extraordinary idea of inviting artists to relocate to their small city, and offered many incentives, including incentives on buying and renting property. The result, from all I hear, is a lively, evolving arts community.

Last year I was in Carbondale, Illinois, for a conference at the Univ. of Illinois. Paducah is not more than 40 miles away, and although I didn't drive down to Paducah, I heard a great deal about it. And I personally enjoyed the friendliness, and beauty, of that part of the country.

http://paducaharts.com/about.php

Community Land Trusts for Artists and other Low Income People

2006-06-30T06:03:00.000-07:00

In spite of the assumption that artists have poor organizational skills, it's not true. Creative people around the country have, and are, organizing to create affordable, and environmentally appropriate, space, especially now that it's becoming increasingly difficult to be a working artist.

One important option for communities - from low income urban groups to land based intentional communities - is the COMMUNITY LAND TRUST. There are several organizations in the U.S. that have long assisted groups to create CLT's - among them the School of Living, based in Pennsylvania. Last year it was my pleasure to attend their conference on Community, and to meet again my friend Rita Jane Leasure, who is still the President of the School of Living. More on THE SCHOOL OF LIVING later............ http://www.schoolofliving.org/landtrust.htm

For information on artists in Chicago that have created a CLT, visit: http://www.chicagoartistsresource.org/?q=node/455

I copy below information on ICE, and information about both urban and rural CLT's, and excerpt from an excellent article by Winton Pitcoff.

Institute for Community Economics
Sarah Page, Executive Director
57 School Street
Springfield, MA 01105-1331
413-746-8660
fax 413-746-8862
www.iceclt.org

Excerpt from:

Affordable Forever
Land Trusts Keep Housing Within Reach
By Winton Pitcoff

For the article http://www.landcentre.ca/lcframedoc.cfm?ID=3763

The Institute for Community Economics (ICE), one of the early champions of the movement, defines a community land trust as a private nonprofit corporation created to acquire and hold land for the benefit of a community and provide secure affordable access to land and housing for community residents. Community land trusts develop housing through renovation or new construction, and sell (or sometimes rent) the units to low-income families; the CLT leases the land to the families, who agree to restrictions on how the house can be transferred in the future. As a result, CLTs are able to produce high-quality affordable housing, and keep it affordable in perpetuity.

Sustainability is one of the defining characteristics of a community land trust. Because the CLT owns the land and restricts who can purchase the home in perpetuity, it can ensure permanent affordability for the unit, unlike the many subsidy programs that have time limits. Because homebuyers rely on mortgages and other traditional financing tools to purchase the house, there is no long-term debt for the organization beyond the cost of the land itself; no ongoing subsidies are required. Most CLTs carry no debt on the land they own, thanks to initial grants from housing trust funds, other government programs, and philanthropic sources. And when CLT homeowners move out, the resale formulas that govern the sale balance the need to maintain affordability and the owner’s right to recapture some of the appreciated value of the home.

Permanent affordability makes the CLT model stand out from other models of affordable housing development, says Carey Shea, a program officer at the Surdna Foundation, which supports ICE’s work. “Originally the 15-, 20-, or even 30-year affordability plans looked good because none of us anticipated how the markets would change,” she says. But now, with subsidies expiring on tens of thousands of units around the country, the appeal of the CLT model, particularly in areas where the housing market is tight, is even more apparent.

“CLTs build wealth for both the community and the individual homeowners,” explains ICE Executive Director Sarah Page. “The community gets permanently affordable, stewarded land, and the homeowners get all of the advantages of owning a home – security, a chance for appreciated value, tax benefits, and a bridge over the gap between rental and market-rate homeownership.”

Art Space USA - Creating CLT's for Artists, Non-profits, and others

2006-06-26T08:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.artspaceusa.org

Based in Minnesota, Artspace is the oldest non-profit organization of it's kind in the U.S. Among their numerous projects, they are involved in the development of the CURLEY SCHOOL ARTISTS LOFTS project in Ajo, Arizona -

http://www.curleyschool.com

From their Mission Statement:

"The mission of Artspace Projects is to create, foster and preserve affordable space for artists and arts organizations. We pursue this mission through development projects, asset management activities, consulting services, and community-building activities that serve artists and arts organizations of all disciplines, cultures, and economic circumstances. By creating this space, Artspace supports the continued professional growth of artists and enhances the cultural and economic vitality of the surrounding community."

The Artspace Story

Finding and retaining affordable live/work space is an age-old problem for artists, painters, sculptors, dancers, and others who require an abundance of well-lit space in which to work. Many artists gravitate to old warehouses and other industrial buildings, but their very presence in an industrial neighborhood often acts as a catalyst, setting in motion a process of gentrification that drives rents up and forces the artists out.

This is precisely what happened in Minneapolis' historic Warehouse District in the 1970s and led to the creation of Artspace in 1979. Established to serve as an advocate for artists' space needs, Artspace effectively fulfilled that mission for nearly a decade. By the mid-1980s, however, it was clear that the problem required a more proactive approach, and Artspace made the leap from advocate to developer. Since then, the scope of Artspace's activities has grown dramatically. Artspace is now America's leading nonprofit real estate developer for the arts. In the last few years, Artspace has further expanded its mission to incorporate the planning and development of performing arts centers, museums, other arts facilities, and entire arts districts throughout the country."

http://web.archive.org/web/20050206015811/www.artspaceusa.org/about/

Artists Space Network

2006-06-25T20:46:00.000-07:00

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). "