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Friday, February 3, 2017
Providence People Loving and Supporting Each Other So Much & Mr. Bones
Sunday, January 15, 2017
Cold Winter Announcements
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Wednesday, January 4, 2017
SITE VISIT #7 ABC No Rio
The Dirt Palace is getting strategic (making a plan)! As part of this process we're visiting some organizations/space that we admire and hope to learn from. This post is part of a series of profiles of spaces that we have visited. This project is supported by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
ABC No Rio
(Becky Howland holding up tote bag designed by artist Julie Hair)
Interviews with Founder Becky Howland and Director Steve Englander
At a Glance
Founded: 1980
Budget:
Staff: 1
Board of Directors: 11
There are no program directors at ABC No Rio. Projects and programs are run by sub-collectives of volunteers.(volunteer run programs, consensus based, fluctuating numbers of volunteers):
Punk/hardcore matinees - usually 8-15 people
Visual arts - 7 - 10
Darkroom - 4 - 6
Zine library - 3 - 5
Print shop - 2
COMA experimental music - 2
About (from ABC No Rio website):
ABC No Rio is a collectively-run center for art and activism. We are known internationally as a venue for oppositional culture. ABC No Rio was founded in 1980 by artists committed to political and social engagement and we retain these values to the present.
We seek to facilitate cross-pollination between artists and activists. ABC No Rio is a place where people share resources and ideas to impact society, culture, and community. We believe that art and activism should be for everyone, not just the professionals, experts, and cognoscenti. Our dream is of cadres of actively aware artists and artfully aware activists.
Our community is defined by a set of shared values and convictions. It is both a local and international community. It is a community committed to social justice, equality, anti-authoritarianism, autonomous action, collective processes, and to nurturing alternative structures and institutions operating on such principles. Our community includes artists and activists whose work promotes critical analysis and an expanded vision of possibility for our lives and the lives of our neighborhoods, cities, and societies. It includes punks who embrace the Do-It-Yourself ethos, express positive outrage, and reject corporate commercialism. It includes nomads, squatters, fringe dwellers, and those among society's disenfranchised who find at ABC No Rio a place to be heard and valued.
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(brief history recounted in greatly expanded versions in countless other locations on the internet)
ABC No Rio came out of the The Real Estate show, when a group of artists broke into 123 Delancey Street, right before New Year’s Eve 1979, to create a gallery exhibition criticizing the city of New York’s development policies and disinvestment of the neighborhood. On January 2nd the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development padlocked the building, from the inside, locking the artists from their work and show. Through negotiations with the city, the artists were granted use of a building that subsequently housed ABC No Rio from 1980 - 2016. Currently the ABC No Rio building at 156 Rivington is slated for demolition with plans to build a new building for the organization at the same address.
ABC No Rio holds a space in both of our imaginations for the punk matinees of the early to mid 90's that we attended as teenagers. (a fact we found out about each other only when we began discussing ABC No Rio recently). What a long history and series of transformations from 1980 till now! It was amazing to interview both Becky Howland who one of the founders, and Steve Englander who stewarded ABC No Rio as its director from the 90's to the present day,.
We've been told over and over by Becky, and others’ involved in the early days of ABC No Rio, that everyone who was part of that history has a different story and version of the events that went down in 80's that led to the procurement of the No Rio space after the publicity of the shutdown Real Estate Show. For the most part our blog posts have been based on the oral conversations that we’ve had with people. However, Becky’s writing on the early days paints such a portrait of the history that we’ve excerpted a bunch from what she wrote about ABC No Rio in Printed Matter’s, A Book About Colab (and Related Activities).
We broke into an abandoned building for our show about real estate, which opened New Year’s Eve, 1979. Our ragtag bunch did it - and, were rewarded for it- with the space that became ABC No Rio. Amazingly, 35 years later, we own the building. With its program of art and activism, it will remain as what might be called a shrine to defiance, long after we are gone.
Everyone loves a good outlaw story, and, for me this is how it began:
Growing up with the Tumult of assassinations, feminism, and protests against the war in Vietnam - dissent is in my bones. Wending my way from a small town upstate, I arrived in Lower Manhattan in 1974, seeking the community of artists. Nights of gliding to openings, and days of grappling with the reality of the precarious life of an artist. Most artists were living illegally, in commercial loft buildings. If an inspector saw a house plant in a window, a bag of groceries, or a bathtub - Eviction!
By 1979, globally, tension was high - 60 American hostages were taken in Iran. Here at home, real estate values began to climb, and stories emerged of fire marshals forcibly evicting artists from lofts; paintings and possessions dumped on the street. Then, as now, a black woman - Elizabeth Mangum was brutally killed as she resisted eviction from her home in the dead of winter. Under the city glitter, it felt grim, explosive.
Becky recounts how Alan Moore wanted to do a show about real estate and had the idea to break into 123 Delancey to do the show. Becky says “Alan’s friends in Colab weren’t keen on this, so it simmered until we decided to do it anyway, and dedicated it to the murdered woman, Elizabeth Mangum.” This was the first we heard about the Elizabeth Mangum story as impetus and fire for the Real Estate show.
The memories of the early days were fast and loose and somewhat based on timing and coincidence. One of our favorite stories is that, when things started heating up with the city around the Real Estate show, Becky peripherally ended up knowing a woman who was one of the city bureaucrats who had they had to negotiate with. In the not so distant past the woman had been a waitress at a restaurant near where Becky had been working as a plumber’s apprentice. It was a small town coincidence that we are very used to in Rhode Island, where individuals end up having connections from “previous lives” that become part of how people, who might have oppositional interests, are able to see each other as reasonable humans and form unlikely alliances.
Becky describes the course of events leading up to the founding of ABC No Rio: One night we were going around to bars to talk up the Real Estate Show, and then suddenly less than 3 weeks later we were having to figure out how to handle actually having a foot hold into Real Estate. Colab was firm about not wanting to have a fixed location and so we had to regroup from there.
In the end, Becky put her name on the month-to-month lease because no one else would do it.
After a seven year stint, Becky quit the board around 1987. While relaying this long history of ABC No Rio, from 1980 to the present, well past her own direct involvement, Becky still used the word “we” when describing the changes and fluctuations of the organization. She says “ABC No Rio was important of it’s time because there were virtually no artist spaces in Manhattan and the ownership stake in the building was a toehold in NYC for future ruckus”.
Contextually, in the mid-80’s the whole scene started shifting because of the AIDS crisis. A lot of activity had been happening in bars and clubs, but as people got sick, people started staying home. New York’s landscape started to shift.
Steve Englander had been involved informally in ABC No Rio in the 80's. He left for a bit and came back into the fold through his personal history with squat movements when the group was fighting the city in 1994. It was during this period that No Rio started operating more collectively. Programming came organically. Who showed up is who decided what the programming was. Decision making was based on general consensus. There was a lot of trust and goodwill at this point amongst a group that knew each other well.
It was fascinating to hear Steve riffing on the power of the secretary within boards and organizations, pointing out that the secretary actually writes the history of an organization’s decisions, formulates the language for proposals and resolutions, and can have a huge amount of influence, even in collective structure. When pressed on how ABC No Rio can exist in NYC with such a modest budget Steve cited two reasons.
- “Through ABC No Rio's fabled resourcefulness”
- Because of Steve’s personal history with the squatter’s movement and his current residence in a former squat, with incredibly low rent, he is able to have a salary much lower than most people could afford with normal NYC rents.
Steve sees his role in the organization as more of a coordinator than a director. His job outside of budgetary administration is to work with the collective members to ensure the success of their programs. However, he is a “dictator” about safety, security and cleanliness. He spends about 10-25% of his time managing volunteers.
What will happen to ABC No Rio? With 7 million dollars raised for their new facility, they still have quite a lot of fundraising to do. However Steve, who seems incredibly pragmatic, is optimistic based on the logic that they represent a part of New York City that’s integral to its identity that has almost vanished, and that elected officials also seem to understand and have nostalgia for.
Monday, January 2, 2017
SITE VISIT #6 Colab
The Dirt Palace is getting strategic (making a plan)!
As part of this process we're visiting some organizations/space that we admire and hope to learn from.
This post is part of a series of profiles of spaces that we have visited. This project is supported by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
COLAB (Collaborative Projects, Inc.) https://collaborativeprojects.wordpress.com/
Interview with founding members Robin Winters and Coleen Fitzgibbon
At a Glance
Founded: 1977
Budget:
Staff:
Board of Directors:
Board of Advisors:
Mission:
Colab started in 1977 with a large (sixty-plus, in three waves thru 1985) group of young artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians & performers living in grungy downtown Manhattan who decided to work together, creating such group efforts as X Magazine, live Colab TV performances on Manhattan Cable, open-call art theme shows (such as Times Sq. Show 1980, the Real Estate Show, Manifesto Show, The Dog Show, The Income & Wealth Show, Just Another Asshole Show, the Doctors & Dentists Show, Exhibit A, etc) and helped create and assist other artists’ venues with Colab’s funding (ABC NO RIO, New Cinema, Nightshift Theater and Spanner Magazine). Colab was closer in nature to a very large wide open Bloomsbury Group where no one was in control but most of the arts were represented.
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Colab started in 1977 with a large (sixty-plus, in three waves thru 1985) group of young artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians & performers living in grungy downtown Manhattan who decided to work together, creating such group efforts as X Magazine, live Colab TV performances on Manhattan Cable, open-call art theme shows (such as Times Sq. Show 1980, the Real Estate Show, Manifesto Show, The Dog Show, The Income & Wealth Show, Just Another Asshole Show, the Doctors & Dentists Show, Exhibit A, etc) and helped create and assist other artists’ venues with Colab’s funding (ABC NO RIO, New Cinema, Nightshift Theater and Spanner Magazine). Colab was closer in nature to a very large wide open Bloomsbury Group where no one was in control but most of the arts were represented.
****************************************************************************
P: Ok, full disclosure: When I was in the Art Practice graduate program at SVA, Robin Winters, one of the founding members of Colab, was my “mentor”. (Admittedly I have some weirdness around how infantilizing that term is, used by the institution for what was basically your main advisor expected to be on call for intensive “one on ones” - but ultimately it was a wonderful and magical system that worked well when the parties were compatible). I knew that working with Robin would be great, but super felt like I had won the lottery in terms of how generous he was with his time, insight, and perspective. Robin was probably one of the only options of potential advisors who I knew had DEFINITELY done way more illegal things than I had (Definitely a plus, especially while insecurities about buying into the ponzi scheme of art graduate programs were running high). I remember hearing stories of Robin and Coleen Fitzgibbon doing their performance “Take the Money and Run”, where they essentially convinced the audience to give them the contents of their pockets and purses (ie. all of their money!) and then locked the audience in the space and left. I think there was some caveat that, if the audience worked together to get out of the locked space, they may get their money back.
While we were doing research on the history of the Alternative Arts Space movement, it was clear that Colab, although they didn’t run a physical space, had inspired so many other groups, projects and spaces. If we had an opportunity to talk to some members about their history with Colab, we should jump on it.
Anyone could join Colab. All that was required of a potential member was that they attend three consecutive meetings. To have a project supported or funded by Colab, it required three people (two of which had to be official members) and to receive a majority ¾ vote.
A lot has been written about Colab in the last decade or so that we came across in our research: Julie Ault’s Alternative Art New York 1965 - 1985, Exit Art’s Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces 1960 -2010, Printed Matter’s A Book About Colab (and Related Activities), not to mention the New Museum’s “XFR STN” (Transfer Station), media archiving project. Still, given that Robin was a friend, it seemed important to get some stories straight from, at least two of, the horse’s mouths. After poking around Robin’s studio looking at his glass head sculptures and marveling how we had the same antique turquoise sink as we used to have at the Dirt Palace, we sat down with Robin and Coleen at a cafe by both of their studios.
We were interested how exactly Colab was run and how power, duties, and roles were assigned and distributed, and how exactly accountability worked in such an anarchistic scene. With so many people involved over a period of 7 years, we wondered how things played out over what was described to us as three different waves of artists.
There was no ideological united front amongst Colab members, which is something we’ve often thought was important to how the Dirt Palace organized. While we call ourselves a feminist space, there is no hovering ideology that members must adhere to. It’s been a significant part of our project to provide a space and resources to artists with different relationships to feminism, gender and politics. Robin and Coleen explained that there were many disparate points of view - some were “cottage industry capitalists”, others were interested in anti institutional models, and at one point a group of socialists (not artists socialists) tried to take over a meeting and usurp the group . The initial ideas around organizing had more to do with pooling resources than with shared political agendas. No critics and curators were allowed to join and 50% of Colab members were women.
Early on, Colab meetings adopted Robert’s Rules of Order, and had four officers to make sure that no one “ran off with the money”. But how were roles divided up? Who wrote the grants that funded projects? Coleen recounts that the grant work was mostly done by the women of the group. Having had some short lived experience living in radical communes, where labor was still neatly divided along gender lines, she pointed out that, because the group did not have a living or space component, that there was more opportunity for equity within gender roles within Colab. Yet some things like grants, more often than not, she remembers, fell to the women of the group. Robin jumps in and disagrees with this version of history. The two go back and forth. We laugh. We’d been warned about the famous Colab arguments. But to be fair, it wasn’t the kind of argument filled with vitriol and real conflict that you want to run from. But rather, it was the kind argument filled with fire that’s safe and warm like an internet play-fighting kitten meme. Robin and Coleen switched argument topics, and squabble about a summer house that Colab had rented together one time. Coleen’s take on the rental house was that it was a great time where they shared some bonding experiences. The time spent outside the city brought them together and allowed them to have experiences other than meetings and fighting. Robin counters - The whole summer house thing just codified how bourgeois the roots of Colab were!
We ask about the arguing.
Oh yeah they tell us, only half joking…”the thing about Colab was that most people dropped out because it was a lot of arguing over very little”
Walter Robinson (the brains behind the rental house) writes in A book about Colab:
“Colab held regular meeting, of course, to scheme and plan and do a little bit of work. The greatest attention was typically focused on allocating grant money for a wide range of projects. Meetings were frequently acrimonious and almost universally considered to be pure torture. In fact, you could say that Colab democracy worked because nobody could stand being in charge for very long. It’s an amazing thought: Colab managed to sustain itself as a democratic, collaborative consensual organization because the meetings were unbearable.”
But Robin continues, we also generally got along and enjoyed each other, and most of us are still friends today.
Well there’s Diego, Coleen chimes in.
Yes, Robin agrees, Diego officially disbanded, but we’re still friends.
While it’s always fun to talk about the drama and disagreements, you can’t talk about Colab without addressing some of its visionary ideas pertaining to organizing artists. Part of Colab’s legacy are some ideas that never got traction in the day, but are still relevant to our current times. Robin had ideas of forming an Artists’ Union and an Artist Bank. The artist union would negotiate and ensure fees for artists working in public venues such as museums, similar in concept to the work W.A.G.E is just doing now. The Artist Bank would own a collection and you couldn’t buy a work of art from the artist union unless you used the artist bank. The bank could be used to leverage capital and directly support artists while simultaneously acknowledging the art world as a 1% system. The bank would serve as a huge resource that could directly empower artists as an organized group within the economic system. Then Robin mentions that the plan had been for Jeffrey Deitch to run the bank.
The mind boggles at all the possible outcomes had this scheme ever been put into motion.
This reminds us that we have been meaning to check out local PVD braniac and artist Tom Sgouros' book on community banking Checking the Banks. More Research to come!
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