As I walked the warehouses with the feeling that it was the end of the low-budget era, I asked myself if that would be so bad. Hundreds of poorly climate-controlled cubicles housing hundreds of lackluster artists; I imagined them all washed away on a hurricane of wealthy redevelopment. Priced out of warehouse space, they would be forced to work in their basements or kitchens where they could enjoy their pastime without troubling the rest of us. Would that be a bad thing?
One of the main reasons artists rent warehouse space is to give themselves credibility in their own eyes. I remember my first space, on the top floor of Riverside Mills in Providence, Rhode Island. It was a huge, decrepit timber and stone mill building, shambling along towards the inevitable fire (which luckily happened a few years after I left). The first floor housed a couple of serious businesses making plastic bags and ball bearings, the second floor was honeycombed by little companies making junk jewelry (a mainstay of the Rhode Island economy), and, at the very top, artists' studios.
Elaine Bradford was too busy to set up her CSAW studio, her show having just opened at Lawndale's Mezzanine Gallery. That's her mom deciding where to hang the enormous crochet-encased deer head.
I appreciate the gray background, and the pentimento of a fourth stripe visible just to the right of the visible stripes.
Tolbert's father trapped in a Dan Flavin installation
2 comments
keep going bill! you scratched the surface!
Well if I’d like to maintain my 20-year marriage into its 21st year this December, it might be a bad thing to have a domestisized* home studio. Oh yes, he will be my art slave and my art pimp, but I don’t think he’d give up our kitchen, bedroom, living room, garage and the rest of the house so that it could be filled absolutely full with tire remnants, baling wire, industrial foam, resin, tar and other found objects. Oh if only I were a painter!
Why yes, having a studio in an artist collective setting gives the illusion of validating oneself as an artist, but more importantly without it I would never have met artists that have influenced and helped me mature in my work through critical discussion. Artists such as Garland Fielder, Howard Sherman, Brian Portman, Masumi Kataoka, Barna Kantor, Young-Min Kang, John Adelman, Katalin Hausel and many others, not only have they been influential, but they have become friends. Could this have happened hidden away in my own domestisized* cave? I think not.
Did I list enough artist names to help you with your popular blog?
Soon I must take the risk to climb out of the collective and stand on my own 2 feet. The way things are shaping up that could be as soon as next week. So I take your intro as an encouragement that I can move on.
Kathy Kelley
http://www.kathrynkelley.blogspot.com
*hope I am allowed to make up words.