(Not) Starting a Model Urban Arts Collaborative: Turning a Good Idea into a Bureaucratic Debacle

A digital filmmaker friend contacted me. We had worked together successfully with LGBTQ youth to make a documentary about their own lives growing up gay in the Midwest and dreamed of extending this work. She spotted this:

The Arts Initiative of a Major Midwestern University and a collaborative group of corporate sponsors and developers—the Campus Gateway—are teaming up to create an Arts Alley, designed to help creative, talented, entrepreneurial artists compose their lives and create work in Columbus. To facilitate a dynamic community of visual and performing artists in this Gateway area, partners will provide a former retail space (approximately 1,000 square feet¹) for year-long use as studio/gallery/performance/programming space for emerging interdisciplinary visual and performance artists. Artists should apply as a team; proposals should embracing cross-cutting activity, and include creating collaborative, project-based works while building community, exhibiting and selling artwork, performing, teaching and offering public lectures, events, and studio talks. Artists will be expected to interact with one another and with the Arts Initiative and Campus Gateway.²

Working with friends, we develop Mix(Ed) Media—a digital multimedia educational organization. We act quickly to leverage resources. We obtain the promise of a set of 25 gently used Apple computers. We can borrow digital cameras and video equipment. We can tap collaborators, artists, and teachers from a network of local friends, employers, artists, educators, and supporters. We draft a year-long programming plan starting with an invite-only/pre-registration classes and workshops; adding a more robust, open-enrollment schedule of class/group offerings; and eventually offering open studio hours for students and community members. We envision “community” extending from LGBTQ youth, to the university student population, to the predominantly lower-income minority residents clinging to their neighborhood.

We make the finals. The six-judge panel loves three proposals, so they bring us together to see what might emerge. The panel/partners admittedly have no clear idea of what they want, the Arts Alley being their initial project. To compensate, they believe fervently that whatever we do, we are building a model, a template, for others—cities, universities, artists, organizations—to replicate our certain success.

Mix(ed) Media meets beforehand. We see a few options: we lose and go home, or we invite the other groups to join our collective and let us manage the space, or the other groups lose and we win. These did not happen; they were too easy.

Instead, we agree our three groups (really four because one is already a hybrid of two smaller organizations) will form a mega-collective to collaboratively occupy and manage the space. Naturally, we need more meetings, so instead of monthly, we begin having lengthy weekly or twice-weekly meetings, with extended side conversations alongside.

The year of the Arts Alley was a big time-wasting disaster in terms of generating income, building an arts community, invigorating the economic outlook of the immediate surroundings, or providing a space for a team of artists to compose their lives and work in Columbus. But we did learn from our year-long failed efforts:

• • Vision and Goals Are Important

  • • An unwieldy, unfocused collection of partners encourages assumptions, misunderstandings, conflicts, and failures.

• • Definitions Vary by Audience

  • • “Studio” means different things to artists, administrators, and corporate developers. The visual arts collective envisioned a kiln and pottery classes; the theater/dance performance collective envisioned staging, scenery, and seating; Mix(ed) Media imagined carts of digital equipment with studio space for incorporating other media in collaborative, multimodal productions.

  • • Artists assumed studio space encouraged on-site production of art.

  • • Corporate/university partners understood studio more like gallery, designating very prescribed conditions involving little visible mess. Glitter becomes subversive under these circumstances.

  • • Months-long talk of using a hidden, empty, raw space (i.e., dirt and gravel floors) for messy art-making studio stalled for unknown reasons.

• • Details (Space, Constraints, and Financial Obligations) Matter

  • • Retail space is fine for selling art, but not so much for art making.

  • • The art world includes commercial components, but collaboration...