Artists in Storefronts

I [Joan Vorderbruggen] am the sole organizer of the project with support from the Whittier Alliance, my neighborhood association. They fund the project and serve as a fiscal agent for donations and the grant opportunities that I am currently pursuing.

Our six week pilot began in April, 2012. We received an anonymous donation at the end of our pilot, so I decided to flip the project and created a much larger, seven week run that included a pop-up gallery, pop-up boutique, a mosaic mural, a stencil art mural, and a closing festival in which we animated a pedestrian bridge over a major interstate and threw a community festival.

I am a freelance storefront designer and a textile artist. I was inspired by a public art project created by a local photographer, Wing Young Huie. He animated a few miles of a major commercial sector with black and white photography of the neighborhood’s residents in shop windows, with billboards, and projections. I got the idea to create storefront designs for an entire city block of my own creation, an urban walking gallery of my work in a commercial area that has been affected by the economy in an effort to increase foot traffic and interest. That idea fell on deaf ears, but I was too interested in the concept of animated storefronts to let the idea go so I began researching other very successful projects on either coast that paired multiple local artists with vacant commercial spaces. I created a template and a proposal and pitched it to a few arts organizations in town to no avail, and finally realized that my very own neighborhood stood to benefit from such work.

The number grows with each run. Our third, largest, and longest run opens December 5th and will include 19 storefront exhibits, a graffiti mural, a pop-up performance art festival, a public art sculpture that will animate a vacant lot, and a fashion design challenge in which six local designers create garments from a five year old’s drawings. We will feature work by over 35 local artists not including all of the performers in our festival, DJs, and video projectionist that will animate our opening reception.

Opening receptions, walking and biking tours, and closing festivals. Of course now a local artist is curating a performance art festival in which he is enlisting local talent for 8 events during the ten week run. The artist creating the public art sculpture which will animate a vacant lot will also be hosting “snowman building events” after each snow this winter.

I delegate opportunities to artists and let them develop their own ideas, but I also determine the events we will host, including the dates for walking and biking tours of the project, open houses, as well as opening and closing receptions.

Yes, and I review them for completeness then work the puzzle of placing all artists who are interested in the spaces that I have acquired permissions for.

I think I may have answered that?? Let me know if you wish for more information.

In four short months five participating vacant properties acquired short and long term leases with a combined vacancy of over ten years. That statistic proves the project is effective as a free staging service to property owners to prick the interest of independent business owners. I could certainly use more assistance. It’s a very large scale collaboration and it would be marvelous to have the resources to get more support and man power but for now it’s my project and I keep driving forward in the hopes that it will continue to evolve.

I hope that we will continue to create lease agreements as we have been in direct response to animating these vacant spaces and in doing so at some point can charge property owners for this service with the end result being able to pay the participating artists. In a perfect world we would provide significant artist and beautification stipends, making the project more competitive but also giving artists a well deserved payment for their work and talent. I keep working as hard as I do to inch ever closer to that being a reality.