Kristen Mallia’s apartment at Fort Point is spacious and sunny, with exposed brick walls and a high ceiling. The high windows overlook the city. There is a look at a living room, drawn by sofas and a rug, but otherwise the space is almost uniquely dedicated to Mallia’s work as an artist. What, in most apartments, would manifest itself as a mess is precisely organized as a collector. A huge drawing board is arranged with a meticulous asymmetry: a notebook, a pyramid of empty frames, a pile of stones.
Mallia shows me the apartment one afternoon. First point out the kitchen, which is actually just a wall of appliances. “And then this area is pretty much my workspace,” he says, gesturing to the rest of the apartment.
Mallia, an assistant professor of graphic design at Suffolk University, moved into her apartment in late 2020 after nearly two years on the waiting list. The sheer amount of space, he says, has made working on multiple projects much easier. You can spread a picture on the floor, then move on to graphic design on your desktop, then jump on the artist’s desk, and (I imagine) spend hours rearranging your lovely miscellaneous assortment to Instagram-worthy perfection, all without having to pack. create a project to give rise to the next one.
Along a wall hangs a series of huge paintings, studies of volcanic rocks that Mallia collected during a residency in Iceland. They look like marked asteroids, represented on translucent tracing paper in shades of black and gray. Such large pieces are a new venture for her and only started after she moved into the studio. “I could finally start pushing the ladder with everything,” Mallia says.
Mallia’s live studio / work is one of the 89 units of Midway Artist Studios, a collective of artists occupying three former wool stores extensive at No. 15 Channel Center St. in the Fort Point neighborhood of Boston. The units are large, open and robust, adaptable to almost any use: painting, jewelry, photography, dance. Thirty-six units are priced below market price and are reserved for residents who meet the requirements across the city. Mallia says the rigorous qualifying process, across town, for her restricted-income apartment “wasn’t fun.” But, “I would do it again in a second, obviously,” he says. “Whatever it takes to be in a space where I can be doing what I want to do.”
The unit comes with an even greater rarity in the city of Boston: security. Mallia does not have to worry about getting the price removed or being moved by a developer, because the building is owned and operated by the artists who live there.
This is what brought me to Midway Artist Studios. Its history is a novelty in the rhythm of the arts and culture, which is full of stories of communities of artists in crisis: the closure of the beloved music venues in the neighborhood, the decrease in the availability of affordable practice spaces , the destruction of decades-old artist communities to make way. for luxury apartments. The drum of the disappearance of cultural space is daunting for anyone who cares about the arts, and perhaps for anyone who wants local cities instead of chain stores and banks. The Midway Artists Collective is one of the few groups of artists who fought to gain control of their building and won. I wanted to know how.
The note under the door
Artists began moving to Fort Point in the 1970s, after the decline of the textile industry brought into play the huge wool warehouses in the area. The characteristic brick lofts of Fort Point, with their loading floors and forklifts, were appealing to artists, who made creative use of the rugged, well-lit spaces with minimal supervision. Read also : NCET Biz Tips: Juxtaporing art to grow your business. They built the studios to suit their needs and, to further reduce costs, they sometimes lived illegally in the spaces. According to a city study, in 1995, artists occupied floors in 18 Fort Point buildings.
In the late 1990s a boom in development began, which drove artists in favor of office space and high-end residential projects. Some communities of artists managed to avoid travel by cooperating. In fact, this was the original plan for Midway Artist Studios, which was previously owned by Bob Kuehn, a mission-driven real estate developer. He was instrumental in setting up an artists’ cooperative in another warehouse on Summer Street in 1995. But Kuehn’s unexpected death in 2006 shifted Midway’s ownership of his estate to the future. of the building in limbo.
This was the context in which Raber Umphenour entered Midway in 2011. He and his wife had moved to Boston shortly before, only to be relocated almost immediately when their North End apartment building was rebuilt. . The couple got a 1,100-square-foot studio on Midway, for which they paid about $ 1,500 a month. Umphenour, a filmmaker, and his wife, an architect, enjoyed the community that came with a building full of artists. “You can share your ideas with them,” says Umphenour. “You can share your tools with them.”
The company that managed the building at that time communicated with the tenants by highlighting photocopied notes under their doors. These missives were usually mundane, related to the routine maintenance of buildings and the like. Umphenour often allowed notes to accumulate. He remembers going through the pile one day in 2013.
“There was a note that said,” We want to inform you that … we intend to sell the building. Don’t worry, the sale won’t affect you, “Umphenour recalls, pausing for a dramatic effect.” As soon as someone says, “The sale won’t affect you,” I think the first reaction is almost the opposite. , that is: the sale will definitely affect you “.
The panicked artists convened a meeting. The idea was raised that perhaps they could buy the building collectively. Umphenour and a few others started knocking on doors, asking residents how much money they could invest. They sweetened the deal by offering tenants a return on their investment – 8% a year. According to Umphenour, they raised about $ 517,000 in 72 hours.
All of these were hypothetical commitments, of course. But it was enough to make an offer. The artists decided on an amount that they estimated would not require them to increase rents: $ 20 million.
“And the seller came back to us in a week and described it as‘ non-competitive, ’” Umphenour recalls.
This is the point in history where you can find your assumptions about canceled real estate transactions. In the Boston hot housing market, it is common for buyers to pay above the asking price and for homes to go to the highest bidder. But it turns out that sometimes you can convince sellers. Bob Kuehn, who had also been a prominent figure in the world of affordable housing and historic preservation, had always wanted the Midway building to be artists. Its heritage was adapted to this purpose. Umphenour believes a letter-writing campaign and pressure from city councilors helped the artists ’case. In the end, they were able to persuade Kuehn’s estate to sign a purchase agreement. But it came with a problem: artists had to raise a down payment of $ 2.2 million in cash in 14 business days.
“And so they started two weeks of constant stomach aches and raising $ 80,000 a day to try to get past the goal,” Umphenour says.
“You were fighting for something that wasn’t abstract. It was very concrete. You were fighting to be able to preserve the community, the friendships, the livelihoods of your friends and neighbors and colleagues.”
The stakes, he explains, were high. “You were fighting for something that wasn’t abstract. It was very concrete,” says Umphenour. “You were fighting to preserve the community, friendships, livelihoods of your friends and neighbors and colleagues.”
The artists came together. Some took money out of retirement accounts. People invested as much as they could, from $ 1,000 to $ 100,000. External investors also intervened. Unlikely, they were able to collect the down payment on time. “I think the seller was as surprised as we were,” Umphenour says.
With the down payment on hand, the artists set out to secure the remaining $ 20 million. They enlisted the help of New Atlantic Development, a mission-driven company that helped develop Brookside Artist Studios, a mix of affordable and affordable studio studios and condos in a former rubber factory in Jamaica Plain. . Following the model New Atlantic used with Brookside, Midway artists formed a non-profit organization, Midway Artist Collective Inc., which would own the building and be controlled by a board chosen in part by the artists. (Umphenour is a board member.) They decided to stick with rental units, rather than the more common cooperative model, to keep the entry barrier low. Tenants would not be required to invest, but those who did were promised a decent rate of return. The rest of the money was raised through outside investors, a city grant and low-interest loans, mostly a $ 14.5 million loan from Oppenheimer Multifamily Housing and Finance. Artists closed the property in June 2014.
The arrangement, says Umphenour, has worked better than anyone could have imagined. He estimates that the group is about to pay the principal of the investments of tenants and external investors. He proudly promotes affordable rental units, which are fully supported by the revenue generated by the building without the help of outside grants. Even apartments with no restricted income are below market price. (A 1,900-square-foot Midway apartment costs $ 2,900, less than half the cost of a typical 3-bedroom Seaport). “We really just want to increase rents to the extent necessary to support the operation of the building,” says Umphenour. “And that has resulted in greater financial security for the entire community.”
Scaling up
It always strikes me when I consider the story of Midway, how unlikely things went for the artists, and how easily things could have gone wrong. See the article : Renovation of High School College of Technology Highlights Color-Changing Facade in West Caldwell. What if the seller refuses to accept a lower offer? What if the city didn’t support it? What if artists couldn’t agree on a financial model? What if they didn’t get the rest of the funding? It is impossible to exaggerate the tenacity, commitment and ingenuity of artists, but the role of luck cannot be ignored either.
For Umphenour, its success depended largely on the fundraising model, one that promised a decent return on investment but did not require everyone to invest. “We listened very, very carefully to what people wanted,” he says. “And then we developed and built a very specific model, with the experience of the people we had hired, to meet those needs. Instead of replacing it with what we thought was best.”
They certainly benefited from the alliance with the New Atlantic. The small firm has had a disproportionate impact on the Boston art scene, having developed a number of projects with affordable studios of live / work artists and other cultural spaces. New Atlantic is in the final stages of securing property in Dorchester on behalf of Humphreys Street Studios artists, in an agreement similar to the one the firm helped facilitate for Midway.
But there are limits to the influence of New Atlantic, especially because the developer is small. The company specializes mainly in affordable housing and takes advantage of this experience in the development of cultural spaces. This is the strength of the company, and perhaps its weakness. “I can develop or preserve artist housing for easy living / working,” says New Atlantic founder Bill Hardy. “What I can’t do, and others can’t do, is really develop and preserve the artist’s commercial workspace, because there are no grant programs for the commercial space.” This leaves aside a whole category of artists who are not looking for housing but need space to work, rehearse or sell their merchandise.
Sometimes artists are reluctant to trust a developer, especially when development is what threatens to displace them. “Real estate developers often have a bad name,” Hardy says with an ironic laugh. “There are reasons for that.”
All this means that there is no easy way to replicate the success of Midway artists: no proven and true recipe for buying your own artist building. But the need is clear. Artists have been waiting for years for Midway Studios to open. An obvious question arises: is there a program to help secure the artistic space on a larger scale?
This question took me to San Francisco, where real estate acquisition has become a trend in the city’s cultural sector. The Community Arts Stabilization Trust, or CAST, is a leader in the field. In San Francisco, it is the organization that artists turn to when their building goes on the market and worries that they will lower their price or evict them.
Moy Eng is the CEO of CAST. He tells me that the nonprofit was created in 2013 in response to a set of conditions very similar in San Francisco to those in Boston today. “[Real estate] was about to be … prohibitively expensive,” says Eng in the early 2010’s. And with that came the fear that San Francisco’s artists and cultural organizations, “especially community organizations, small and medium and BIPOC “, had a price outside the city.
CAST’s mission is simple: acquire properties on behalf of artists and cultural organizations and rent them out at an affordable price. Very often, it helps them raise capital and then buy back the property. A deed restriction ensures that the building will continue to be a cultural asset in perpetuity, even if the original buyer decides to sell it. CAST has purchased and renovated four cultural assets in San Francisco over the course of eight years, and is in the early stages of four more potential projects.
What CAST brings to the table is financial insight and a laser-focused mission to preserve the land for cultural use. Like New Atlantic, they finance purchases through low-interest grants and loans. They also make use of New Market tax credits, a federal program designed to channel investments into neglected communities that I have read extensively about and still find difficult to explain. “It’s a complicated mechanism,” says Eng.
The model is not beyond criticism. Noni Session, executive director of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative in Oakland, or East Bay PREC, says that non-profit land trusts, such as CAST, “[tend] to cloister power … and the property benefits between executive directors and boards of directors “. which, in the United States, are overwhelmingly white.
The democratically managed East Bay PREC cooperative model takes a radical investment approach, with a low interest rate of 1.5% designed to reduce the cost of acquiring property. Investors and tenants share the returns. “If your interest rate is 6%, a community can’t run a project like this,” Session says. “They will spend the life of this project paying off the debt instead of serving the community.” Although East Bay PREC has its roots in advocating for housing, the organization has begun to take on cultural projects. He recently bought the Esther’s Orbit Room, which was the centerpiece of a thriving black music scene in West Oakland, and plans to restore it to its former glory.
The strategy of both East Bay PREC and CAST is based on finding something to “give” to the purchase price of the property. “Either it has to be below market price, or there are other mechanisms that make it possible for the acquisition price to be fair,” says Eng. Yes, he says, sometimes they exceed the supply, but less often than you think.
The need for an organization to help strengthen the cultural space in Boston has not gone unnoticed. In fact, former Boston mayoral candidate John Barros, who also served as mayor of economic development for Mayor Marty Walsh, came up with a very similar idea to CAST last year, in an essay in the Boston Globe. “Boston needs a new independent entity, the Boston Arts Development Agency, which is empowered to raise money, buy property, and fund the acquisition and development of housing and commercial space,” Barros wrote.
Following his defeat in the by-elections, Barros re-entered the private real estate industry as managing director of Cushman & amp; Wakefield. And he returned to his idea of an organization that would acquire property in Boston for cultural use.
“Artists often need an intermediary to help them buy a property, redo a property, or refinance a property that allows them to stay,” says Barros.
This is where your organization would come in. Like CAST, Barros’ nonprofit would help artists and cultural organizations buy or rent properties at affordable prices, keeping them for cultural use with writing restrictions. Barros also hopes that the organization can act as a kind of link between artists and developers. “We need to work with developers so that we can maximize the development that is taking place in the city to make it suitable for artists,” he says.
The project is not yet ready for a formal debut, but Barros says funding is being gathered. Once that happens, you can start buying Boston real estate for artists.
Quelle est la dernière œuvre de Picasso ?
The last painting by Pablo Picasso was Self-Portrait of a Chinese Man, in 1972 (Louvre Museum).
What is Picasso’s first painting? In class, he spends his time drawing and cutting characters out of paper. The teacher still allows him to bring back a pigeon that he needs to chew on a class coin. At age 8, Picasso painted his first oil painting. It’s called Little Yellow Picador.
Quelle est l’œuvre la plus connu de Picasso ?
The horror of war convinces Picasso to leave his mark on history. Probably his most famous canvas in the world, Guernica is the painter’s way of exorcising all the anger and revolt he felt when the Spanish Civil War broke out in the town of the same name in 1937.
Où sont exposés les tableaux de Picasso ?
The largest collection of Picasso paintings Tote the history of the artist’s painted work is traced in the collection of the Musée Picasso Paris thanks to the almost 300 paintings that make it up today.
Quelle est le nom du premier autoportrait de Frida Kahlo ?
Frida Kahlo1926 Frida Kahlo painted a self-portrait on a velvet dress in 1926. She made this work in oil on a reproduction of an image reflected in a mirror. This self-portrait, inspired by the work of Parmigianino and Modigliani, marks the beginning of the artist’s professional career.
What is Frida Kahlo’s first self-portrait? Frida Kahlo1926 Frida Kahlo painted her self-portrait in a velvet dress in 1926. She made this work in oil by reproducing her image, which is reflected in a mirror. This self-portrait, inspired by the work of Parmigianino and Modigliani, marks the beginning of the artist’s professional career.
Comment s’appelle le premier autoportrait de Frida Kahlo en espagnol ?
Frida Kahlo “Self-portrait on the border”: Spanish (A2 / B1)) / History of the Arts – Spanish – Pedagogy – Académie de Poitiers.
Quelle est le tableau le plus connu de Frida Kahlo ?
One of the artist’s best-known works, the famous Self-Portrait painting dedicated to Dr. Eloesser, was painted by Frida Khalo in 1940.
Qu’est-ce qu’une installation en arts plastiques ?
A work of contemporary art whose elements, plastic or conceptual, are organized in a given space in the manner of an environment.
What is a plastic art staging? > Explore all the fields of plastic practice and their hybridizations, especially with digital practices. Definitions: Staging: Staging is the orchestration (harmonious composition) of all the elements of a stage production (acting, costumes, sets, lights, etc.).
Quels sont les différents types d’arts plastiques ?
What are the different disciplines of the visual arts?
- The oldest: drawing. the painting. the sculpture. the architecture.
- The most recent: photography. the cinema. the video. the installation. digital art.
Quelle est la différence entre une sculpture et une installation ?
The installation can more often be equated with one more sculpture where it would not be possible to reduce it. We are talking about hybridization and mutations. It also explodes the notion of volume: the installation can be understood as an object of reduced size to a very large space (see for example Monumenta).
C’est quoi le dispositif de présentation ?
Presentation device: This is the way to present the artwork, to combine various elements with each other. Difference between installation and on-site installation: a simple installation proposes a set of elements that form a whole adaptable to an exhibition space.
