arts, artists and ideas

By now you’ve probably caught the viral video of the year depicting Joey DeFrancesco using his marching band The What Cheer? Brigade to back up his dramatic exit from an unsavory job at a Providence, RI hotel. We got to see a preview of the video when Joey and his bandmates visited SPACE in September.

In a recent article for Business Week, Liz Ryan commends Joey for making a bold decision about what was right for him, leaving behind a position that didn’t utilize his talents. She writes, “Instead of getting his musical friends organized to stage a mini quitting concert, Joey might have been using his creative energies to come up with good ideas for the hotel and its patrons. One of my chief complaints about work in most big companies is that they make tasks and assignments so compartmentalized that bright people get squeezed into tiny boxes that waste their brainpower.”

Isn’t this the heart of what the creative economy is about? We need creative and innovative problem solvers at work, and it’s the best companies or organizations that skip the tiny boxes in favor of letting their workers reach their potential.

Unfortunately Ryan misses an opportunity to highlight the real purpose of the video, which was to bring attention to the injustices Joey experienced in his workplace. She should have noted that the Joey Quits “brand” extends to a new website which “serves to expose the abuses against workers that happen everyday in the hotel industry.”

We applaud Joey and company for being opportunistic with the attention they’ve received. Only a truly creative mind would think to turn a crappy hotel job into a workers’ rights movement.

We don’t talk a lot here at SPACE about our Board of Directors, but they’re a fine bunch of people who are involved in a lot of really interesting things. Here are some current news items you may not have heard about.

Christopher Cambell's award-winning house, photo by Raymond Koch

1. Andy Graham sold Portland Color to New York City firm Designtex. You can read a MaineBiz article about it here. We particularly liked hearing Andy talk about the impetus of the sale: “The reason they chose to buy Portland Color was because of the quality of our work force.” Portland Color employs a number of artists that have worked with SPACE over the years. We wish them luck!

2. Winky Lewis and a small gang of artists worked with Joe Malone (also a SPACE Board member) to open a pop-up art gallery for the month of December. They’re having an opening on Wednesday evening.

3. Betsy Evans Hunt is the representative of American photographer Todd Webb’s estate, and she’s been working with the Bowdoin College Museum of Art on a Webb exhibit called “After Atget: Todd Webb Photographs New York and Paris.” There’s an opening on December 9.

4. Our longest-standing Board member (and super landlord) Christopher Campbell designed a house on North Haven that was included in Dwell Magazine’s list of their Top 10 Homes in America. You can read a Huffngton Post story about it here. He’s up there with with some greats, including Walter Gropius and Eero Saarinen.

This weekend Jenny and I were fortunate to attend the Hand-In-Glove Conference in Chicago, hosted and organized by our friends at threewalls. The weekend was tailor made for visual arts facilitators working at the crossroads of creative administration and studio practice. We felt compelled to participate because SPACE‘s programming interests come from an artist-centered perspective and align with many of the individual artists, collectives, storefront spaces, events, and other organizations represented there. The conference was full of people engaged in the pragmatic realities and imaginative possibilities of organizing exhibitions, re-granting programs, publications, residencies, public programs, platforms for projects, and a variety of other programming that challenges traditional formats for the production and reception of art at the grass-roots level.

What do we have in common? We tend to be grassroots, resourceful, innovative, responsive to our community, and focused on artistic excellence. But we certainly weren’t all the same, which was the exciting part. And we all came from a wide variety of kinds of communities.

We caught up with Sarah Wagner, who runs a residency program called DFLUX in Detroit along with her husband Jon Brumit, who you may remember from his project Vendetta Retreat at SPACE back in 2005. We hung out with Stephanie Sherman from Elsewhere in Greensboro, North Carolina, and learned more about the residency programs they offer in their thrift-store-museum. We met Eleanor and Oliver Wise of The Present Group, a subscription art project that has channeled over $20,000 toward funding artist projects, stipends, and development of critical essays. We talked into the wee hours with Courtney Fink and Jeanne Gerrity from Southern Exposure in San Francisco about object oriented art and social practice. We learned about workshop structures from Mark Allen of Machine Project in L.A. and heard about their recent lockpicking class. We witnessed Works Progress host a Chicago version of Salon Saloon, which featured a fascinating segment on the history of phone directories in the Windy City.

Why phone directories? Because the conference doubled as the occasion to release threewalls’ newest project, Phonebook 3, a directory of independent art spaces, programming, and projects throughout the United States. We’re glad to be included in this book, which you can purchase on their site (do it!).

We are excited to continue conversations with our peers about these grassroots creative activities and innovative organizing models across the country, and would love to hear about your thoughts and experiences, too.