Baumgartner and other residents at the Artspace Uptown Artist Lofts will be holding an open house event on Saturday, Aug. 20, in the UAL artist gallery.
For decades, Vicky Holt Takamine—a Kumu Hula (teacher of hula), social activist, community leader and executive director of the PA’I Foundation in Honolulu—has sought creative solutions that would rectify the many wrongs her people, and Native artists in particular, have labored under. “We have a lot of challenges in the Native Hawaiian community,” she explains, citing hotels built in sacred locations and her people’s overall invisibility in their homeland.
The artists live on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, which is dozens of miles and many tax brackets away from the nearest urban area, meaning arts supplies are not easily accessible and training on business, marketing and e-commerce is even harder to find. But help is now literally on its way to some of those artists — some of whom sell their wares just to afford dinner — in the form of a small passenger bus.
Three Artspace officials presented information about the progress of the Trinidad demonstration project at Tuesday’s Trinidad City Council meeting, providing answers to questions posed earlier by council members.
Tim Goodridge, coordinator of the East Billings Urban Renewal District, said property owners are working with the Billings Artspace Project to locate its proposed 40-unit live/work housing project for artists in the EBURD.
Have a business-related food idea? You need a commercial kitchen to prepare it in. City Food Studio is one such creative space. Founder Journey Gosselin plans to join forces with Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center, a metalworking studio across the street. Bakers could go there to cast their own cookware, such as rosette cookie irons, for example.
Karen Roper, a Silver Spring activist who has helped shepherd the project, said Artspace is already meeting with artists in the community to discuss how they can obtain housing and studio space at the building.
Following nearly a decade of coordinated planning and development, El Barrio’s Artspace PS109 now is a successful 114,000-square-foot, mixed-use historic redevelopment. The $52 million project, which was completed in late 2014, created 90 low- to moderate-income residential apartment units for local artists with approximately 14,000 square feet of community space on the lower levels.
