2010 MetLife Foundation Innovative Space Award Finalists
910Arts
Location: Denver, CO
910Arts was created to provide affordable, green-built spaces for artists to live and work as well as to provide public interaction with the creative community while revitalizing and respecting a blighted neighborhood. It sought to fulfill a need that the "normal" market was unwilling to address. After 17 banks turned down the project, the construction loan was finally approved. This former 7-Up bottling factory was transformed into 910Arts: 16 artist studios, 7 artist live-work lofts, a coffee house, exhibition and event space where artists practice and share an amazing array of creativity from movement arts to painting, sculpting and mosaics.
Artists For Humanity EpiCenter
Location: Boston, MA
In September 2004, Artists For Humanity completed our permanent facility, the 100% renewable energy EpiCenter. This is a facility completely dedicated to the voice, vision and virtuosity of urban teens and emerging artists. The EpiCenter has a resounding impact on Boston's cultural and environmental communities as an artist workspace, public event and meeting space, resource for environmental awareness and host of the nation's largest exhibited collection of youth-created and inspired art. The EpiCenter is the fourth artist-owned building in Fort Point, which helps preserve this neighborhood's history and character as the largest arts district in New England.
Arts Incubator Kansas City
Location: Kansas City, MO
"The gritty atmosphere of the Arts Incubator facilities was ideal for creative inspiration to start my commercial sculpture business. This is the place where work gets done." Sculptor Spencer Shubert joined the Arts Incubator in 2006 and paid for his small studio by providing maintenance services. Here he honed his craft and learned how to start a business. His studio space grew with his business and in 2009 he graduated from the Arts Incubator, launched a studio and now has a viable fine art and commercial sculptor business. Through training and support received from the Arts Incubator, Spencer is now able to support his family making art. This is the story of what happens inside the Arts Incubator Kansas City building for more than 35 artists each year.
AVA Gallery and Art Center
Location: Lebanon, NH
AVA Gallery and Art Center is dedicated to promoting the visual arts through year-round exhibitions and educational programs that nurture, support and challenge New Hampshire and Vermont artists, and to providing art classes for children, teens and adults of all levels and abilities. AVA's programs, including special events that foster interaction between artists, patrons of the arts and the general public, are dedicated to recognizing art's enriching contribution to our lives. Located in a recently renovated, former factory building AVA provides 21 affordable studio spaces to artists whose presence is integral to the organization.
BorderFRONT Living
Location: San Ysidro, CA
As the only arts and cultural center in the San Diego South Bay, The FRONT: A Collaborative of Arts, Culture, Design & Urbanism is creating the support for the continued development of the arts in mixed media. The BorderFRONT Living Project will fund two artist residences that will engage the citizenry of the community that hosts the busiest land port in the world.
Boston Center for the Arts, Inc.
Location: Boston, MA
The Boston Center for the Arts is the not-for-profit performing and visual arts complex that serves working artists to create, perform and exhibit new works, develops new audiences, and connects arts to the community. The BCA was founded forty years ago in the spirit of community activism by South End residents and artists who believed the arts contribute to the economic and social well-being of people and neighborhoods. Today, our inclusive programming and collective campus’s work offers opportunities for enrichment through the arts, access to affordable spaces for artistic exploration and presentation, community engagement, creative dialogue and professional development.
Convergence
Location: Alexandria, VA
Convergence is a community of people who value creativity, spirituality, diversity and exploration. The mission of Convergence is to be a resource to the artists of the Metro DC area. Through collaboration with local arts organizations, artists, and professionals, we provide resources of space, community, professional and spiritual development.
Hudson Opera House
Location: Hudson, NY
The Hudson Opera House is a vibrant community multi-arts center, New York State’s oldest surviving theatre. Our mission is to promote the arts, foster the cultural and economic development of the region, and restore our historic building. With most of our first floor restored, we provide the community a wide spectrum of educational offerings, concerts, exhibitions, lectures, and theatre performances. At the same time, we support the work of visual and performing artists through fully produced works, commissions, exhibition space, and subsidized performance and rehearsal space. In addition, our staff provides marketing, technical, and administrative support to these artists’ efforts.
Kamehameha Schools
Location: Honolulu, HI
Kamehameha Schools, in consultation with Hawaiian cultural organizations and local families with ties to the area, has undertaken the kuleana (responsibility) to mälama (preserve) national treasures of Hawaiian antiquity with the goal to ho`iho`i kulana wahi pana (restoring sacred places) and put them back to appropriate cultural use. Restoration of cultural sites would serve as the foundation from which cultural and educational activities would be birthed. Within less than two years (from 2007 to 2009) five heiau have gone through some form of restoration in Kahalu'u makai: 1) Ke`ekü, 2) Hale o Papa, 3) Mäkole`ä, 4) Papakoholua, and 5) Häpaiali`i.
MadLab Theatre & Gallery
Location: Columbus, OH
In 2009, MadLab purchased its own facility in downtown Columbus. This facility serves as an incubator for artists of all mediums. After leasing a space for 11 years, MadLab has a proven history of dedication to the community and good business practices.
Murphey School
Location: Raleigh, NC
Refurbishment of historic Murphey School auditorium into state of the art performance facility for use by Burning Coal Theatre Company, whose mission is to create literate, visceral, affecting theatre on topics of significant concern to its community and the world. The Murphey School is also available at below market rate prices to emergent arts organizations, small schools, and colleges without their own performance space.
Project Row Houses
Location: Houston, TX
Project Row Houses (PRH) was founded in 1993 in Houston's Third Ward as a result of the vision of local African-American artists who wanted to have a positive, creative presence in their own community. Artist and community activist Rick Lowe spearheaded the pursuit of this vision when he discovered the abandoned, 1 1/2 block site of twenty-two shotgun-style houses in Houston's Third Ward. PRH seeks to transform the view of art from traditional studio practice to a more conceptual base of transforming the social environment. Thus, our mission is to transform community through the celebration of art and African American history and culture. From the original 22 houses, there are now almost 50 buildings which house artist exhibition spaces, artist residency houses, artist studios, and arts.
Side Street Projects
Location: Pasadena, CA
Side Street Projects is a completely-mobile, artist-run nonprofit organization. Our mission is to give artists of all ages the ability and the means to support their creative endeavors. We teach artists how to roll up their sleeves and do things themselves with education programs that encourage self-reliance and creative problem solving in a contemporary art context. Side Street Projects is part of a growing alternative practice of artists who operate outside the gallery system by working inside communities. We engage in complex public negotiations and socially driven practice.
Topaz Arts, Inc
Location: Woodside, NY
TOPAZ ARTS, Inc. is a nonprofit multidisciplinary arts center located in Woodside, NY. Our mission is to encourage the creation of new work in contemporary performing and visual arts, providing our community with a space that inspires. Maintaining a 2,500sf facility, our space is designed with energy-efficiency and sustainable concepts, providing an urban oasis for both artists and audiences. TOPAZ ARTS enables new works by offering affordable space, technical support, showings and residency opportunities, assisting artists in the realization of their projects. Our programs seek to support the artistic process while engaging creative & cultural exchange with a diverse community.
Urbana Champaign Independent Media Center
Location: Urbana, IL
The Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center (UCIMC) is a grassroots organization committed to using art and media production and distribution as tools for promoting social and economic justice. We foster the creation and distribution of media, art, and narratives emphasizing underrepresented voices and perspectives and promote empowerment and expression through media and arts education. The UCIMC owns and operates a Community Media and Arts Center housed in the historic downtown Urbana post office building. The center includes a stage, radio station, production and artist studios, library, gallery, teaching, and meeting spaces, available to UCIMC artists, members, and the public. We provide fiscal sponsorship to dozens of local, national, and international media and arts projects.
Youngstown Cultural Arts Center
Location: Seattle, WA
Youngstown Cultural Arts Center (YCAC) is a unique multi-purpose facility dedicated to the arts, education, and to the provision of space for members of the community to live, create, converse, and perform. Thirty-six affordable live/work studios for low-income artists of all disciplines occupy reclaimed classrooms on the upper floors and attic. The Cultural Center on the ground floor houses six non-profit tenant organizations that target hard to reach youth with non-traditional approaches to arts education and an alternative program of the Seattle Public Schools. Facilities include a recording studio, media lab, 150-seat theater, movement studio, gallery, and classroom spaces.