Goodbye Tooleshed

   

Since 1990, I've been dividing my time between America and England, spending part of each year in Tucson, Arizona. One of the things I've loved about Tucson (besides its location in the beautiful Sonoran desert) is that it's a city with a thriving art community...although, sadly, that's a community that has been under threat in recent years as rising real estate prices make affordable studio space harder and harder to find. (Ironically, the City's plans for a new Arts District in downtown Tucson is one of the things that is driving prices up and artists out. At this rate, it's looking like the new Arts District will contain few actual artists, replacing working art studios with galleries and boutiques.)   

For over ten years I had the good fortune to share studio space with sculptor Beckie Kravetz in the Tooleshed Studios building -- an old warehouse sandwiched between Toole Avenue and the railroad tracks, just a couple of blocks away from Hotel Congress. The Tooleshed contained a vibrant community of artists of all stripes: painters, sculptors, photographers, print-makers, illustrators, ceramic artists, conceptual artists. I loved the sheer diversity of work produced by Tooleshed artists, from the most traditional to the most avant garde. One rarely encountered snobbery there, or the all-too-prevelant attitude that one kind of art is inherently superior to another. This is rare and precious in the world of modern art. And one rarely encountered art poseurs at the Tooleshed. The artists who worked there worked.

         

Throughout the 1990s the Tooleshed was a wonderful place for making art, with the desert light streaming through the windows, the wail of the trains passing out back, and cold beer on tap at the Hotel Congress bar at the end of a long day.  But all that changed a few years ago, when a new director came to MOCA (the arts organization that manages the building). This director was new to the Tucson art scene and came to it with an agenda of her own, as well as with a narrow, limited vision of what constitutes contemporary art. One by one, the artists in the building were pushed out of their studios...many of those spaces subsequently converted into offices instead. Beckie and I continued to hold on, while the building turned into a ghost of its former self around us. And then we too were summarily evicted. The reason? MOCA's director made no bones about it. She wanted our studio for a "visiting artist" who happened to be a personal friend of hers. (There were other spaces in the building that she could have used, but she'd decided she liked ours best.)  After 10 years as good tenants, we were curtly given 30 days to vacate.

    

Studio eviction is an all-too-common story in Tucson these days. Artists are losing their work spaces right and left -- and then compete for the few remaining affordable spaces, or give up and leave Tucson altogether. It's the same old story: artists move into a derelict neighborhood and make it vibrant and interesting, which attracts developers and raises real estate prices, and then the artists themselves are priced out.

What's unusual about the Tooleshed story, though, is that it wasn't a developer who was doing the evicting this time, but the director of a local arts organization, a woman who publically opposed the eviction of artists from neighboring buildings while quietly evicting them from her own. Because of this, the Tucson Weekly newspaper has just printed an article about the demise of the Tooleshed: "Getting Toole'd" by Tim Vanderpool, which you can read on-line here. If any of you live in Tucson, please consider writing to the Tucson Weekly and/or the MOCA Board of Directors and/or The Tucson Arts District to express concern about all the Arts District studio evictions that have happened in the last year. Otherwise, we're going to end up with an Arts District devoid of artists.

For those of you who aren't in Tucson, please support the artists and art facilities in the communities where you live. It's very difficult for even well-established artists to make a living on their work once the cost of materials and gallery fees are factored in; affordable space to work in is crucial. (The cheap art studios in the Castignetti Building in Boston where the Endicott Studio got its start have long since been converted into million dollar condos.) With real estate booming everywhere, it's harder and harder for artists to find places to work -- and yet our communities would be impoverished places without artists in our midst.

As for the Tooleshed...it was grand while it lasted. (Here's a Tucson Weekly article on the Tooleshed & MOCA in better days, prior to MOCA's current management. It's a bit heartbreaking to read it now, but it also documents how healthy the Tooleshed and the downtown art scene used to be just a few years ago.) Many thanks to James Graham, Dave Lewis, Julia Lantane, John Laswick and all the other good folks who founded the Tooleshed, sweated over it, and gave it such a good, feisty spirit for so many years.

Goodbye Tooleshed. We'll miss you.

 

    

The art in this post is by artists from the "Tooleshed disapora". From top: (1) Photograph of the Tooleshed building, (2) Beckie Kravetz in our shared studio at the Tooleshed, working on a lifesized figure for an installation piece,  (3) Beckie's finished installation piece, (4) misc. sculptures by Beckie, (5 & 6) "Paul and Tony" and "Dave Lewis" by James Graham [and here's a link to James' art on the Endicott site] (7) "Fairy Ring 2" installation by Julia Latane, (7 & 8) "Cairn Circle" exhibition at MOCA and "Catalina State Park, Arizona" by Stu Jenks [you'll also find his work on the Endicott site here and here], (9) "For Joseph, 2005" by Ronn Spencer, (10) wall of masks by Beckie in our shared studio, (11) "Tree Woman" (and me) in the Tooleshed studio.

Comments

[Gwenda]

How absolutely horrible! I'm glad that local press is writing about it, at least.

[chandracerchionepeltier]

That is simply horrific, Terri! Because of my Mom, a fiber artist, and now as an artist myself, I have always lived among working artists. They had no ego problems, and as you said, they worked. Everyone within such communities understand that for the communities to exist successfully, everyone must support one another. In a country overrun with shopping malls, artists maintain society's soul!

To drive off such amazing artists as yourself, Becky, and Stu (as well as the others) is shortsighted and a loss. What a foolish woman.

[Jess]

That's irritating and terrible, and -- there isn't much else to be said about that. Hopefully, she'll get no laurels for her vision, and y'all will make some other part of Tucson interesting and vibrant.

[Jon]

Same thing happened to my former studio building in New York, also run by a small nonprofit arts organization. The founders of the organization were genuine and terrific; then they moved on and a new administrator came in, a woman more interested in furthering her career and looking good in the press than in supporting art and artists. She was good at fundraising though, good at throwing parties for Wall Street types, so the nonprofit's board thought she was great, with all this money pouring in. It took a long time before the board realized what a foul reputation she had with local artists, which was giving the whole organization a bad smell. And donors didn't realize that all the money they were coughing up was going to this administrator's fancy offices, web site, etc. and never actually funded artists or art at all... The nonprofit's board did finally wise up and get rid of her. People like that don't tend to last, they don't function well in the long haul. They make too many enemies.

In the meantime, hang in there, get yourselves a better space, and keep creating.

And here's some advice I read on Salon the other day that might apply here: You Tooleshed artists only had to deal with this MOCA woman for a little while, and now you can move on and leave her behind. She has to deal with herself (and the chaos her attitudes will continue to create) for the rest of her life.

Great site you have here, by the way. Glad to have discovered it.

[Liz]

I knew Tooleshed in its heyday when Dave and James were running it. What a great place, what a boon to Tucson arts. I saw your work, Terry and Becky, during a couple of Open Studios. Saw some of Becky's work at Dinnerware, I think it was, too. Very unusual, beautiful, inspiring work, both of you. Such a shame to think of you all gone from the Big Blue Building (as my husband calls it). We;ve been hearing about what's going on with Moca from other artists and the whole thing stinks. I'm glad Tucson Weekly reported on what's happened there. Also glad to find this blog. I didn't even know there was such a thing as "mythic art" and now I'm intrigued......

[Grey]

This fills me with sadness.

[Andrea]

It's tragic, outrageous, and a terrible loss for Tucson. I have a suspicion of public agendas to dissimilate strong communities, whether ethnic, religious, or cultural, through urban planning & renewal, to produce a sterile, isolated & disconnected consumerist society living in fear. Voices crying in the wilderness, such as artists, are less threatening if they are alone. I hope you are able to remain in Tucson, and continue to create. Your artwork deeply moves me, and it's a travesty that you should lose your studio to politics.