Untitled Document
Psychedelic collages pop from the wall. Slashed
cardboard, tape, wire, spray paint, and charcoal are rendered into
cascading waterfalls, a scrapyard, a glowworm. Down the street, photos and
other works are on display; one shows a man, a typewriter chained to his
ankle, peering into a tavern window. The new galleries and art spaces of Jacksonville,
Springfield’s neighbor to the west, draw an unusual mix of visitors.
Students, budding artists, farmers, and tourists join curious locals to
admire works ranging from figure and portrait paintings of a brunette to
abstract paint on Masonite boards to funky handbags emblazoned with the
phrase “Strangers with candy.”
Surrounded by rolling fields, Jacksonville is still a
farming community, but don’t let the scenery deceive you — this
isn’t Mayberry nestled amid the green acres. Illinois College and
MacMurray College call the historic community of 20,000 home, and
appreciation for the arts in this community has been constant. But with a new crop of ventures shaking up the scene,
Jacksonville is becoming a destination for arts lovers from all over the
region.
Scott Hall packed his bags and left his Jacksonville farm home 12
years ago. He landed in such cultural centers as Seattle, Atlanta, and
Chicago before moving back in October to be closer to his family, back to
the farm, and, in his mind, saying goodbye to gallery openings and cultural
conversation, the hallmarks of his urban stomping grounds. But when Hall, 35, made his return,
Jacksonville’s downtown area wasn’t quite what he remembered.
The plaza had had its ups and downs over the years, but Hall came home to a
lively district focused on the arts. About the same time Hall was unpacking
and settling into the slower pace of small-town living, his
hometown’s pulse was quickening. Last fall, the Eclectic Artists Co-op and Gallery and Noir Art
Emporium opened their doors around the corner from each other. A budding
arts organization, the Imagine Foundation, introduced a list of arts
programs, including the Gallery Hop, which would become a monthly
seven-stop progressive opening. (The next hop is scheduled for 5-8 p.m.
Friday, Aug. 3.) “It [Jacksonville] is kind of culturally
booming. A lot more people are coming forward and bringing forth new ideas
with new businesses and new outlets that we haven’t had in the
past,” says Hall, a member of the Imagine Foundation board.
“With the downtown being revitalized, it’s just a prime time
for expansion in other areas.”
Don’t call Jacksonville’s current surge
in interest in the arts a comeback, though. The area’s creative
community has been quietly thriving for years. The David Strawn Art
Gallery, the Jacksonville Theatre Guild, the Jacksonville Symphony Society,
and Illinois College’s McGaw Fine Arts Center, among other venues,
are known for a steady stream of monthly programs. “There was something laid out and it was very
popular, but those organizations can’t give you something to do every
week,” says Clare Lynd-Porter, executive director of the Imagine
Foundation, “so there was a sense of enjoying the arts, and then when
a group like ours came along and throws a lot more opportunities in, there
has been a tremendous response.”
Over the past year the established scene has gotten a
shot in the arm, but not in any organized capacity. Instead, three
independent endeavors launched within the space of a couple of months.
The Imagine Foundation was originally envisioned as a
social-work agency with an artistic edge, but in fall 2005 the nonprofit
foundation, now housed in the historic Asa Talcott House, became an arts
organization promoting drama, music, and the visual arts. The initial gallery shows weren’t stormed by
artsy scenesters clamoring to participate. Lynd-Porter likens the first
opening, the Imagine Gallery at Lincoln Land Community College’s
Western Regional Center, to yelling across a canyon. “Believe me, it was a long, distant echo from
one end of Lincoln Land to the other when I was the only one up there doing
shows,” Lynd-Porter says. The foundation needed something to get people off the
couch and into the gallery, so Lynd-Porter snagged the idea of a gallery
hop from her hometown of Columbus, Ohio. To pull it off, though, she had to
find other spaces for art lovers to hop to.
With few dedicated galleries to solicit, Lynd-Porter
had to get creative, and that meant using every nook and cranny she could
fit a painting in. The first volunteer was Sandy’s Clip to Mania, a
small hair salon located on the downtown plaza. After the first hop, in September 2006, custom-frame
shop On the Wall joined in. Imagine now curates four hop spots, including
the Three-Legged Dog, a popular downtown coffeehouse.
Jacksonville Art Glass, Noir Art Emporium, and the
Eclectic round out the seven-stop hop. Lynd-Porter says that more and more
people are participating in the hop, and Imagine is selling more and more
art. “At first you couldn’t give it
away,” Lynd-Porter says. “It has taken a little while for
people to understand that there is actually art that you can
have.”
That’s not a misconception exclusive to
Jacksonville dwellers, says Joshua Cox, co-owner of Noir Art Emporium; it’s a cultural
thing. “I think a lot of people don’t ever
imagine buying something like that; they don’t even imagine you could
buy that. People don’t consider that an option,” Cox says. Now, plenty of people are getting the picture. “Having something every week out there
introduces these farmers who may not realize they had an appreciation for
the arts, but yet their wife or son or daughter drags them to one of our
events and they discover, ‘Hey, that’s pretty cool —
maybe I do have an appreciation for the arts that I didn’t know I
had,’ ” Hall says, “so it’s about getting it out in
the community and developing that appreciation.”
In the first six months of 2007, the Imagine
Foundation has sold about $10,000 worth of art and another $1,500 in the
last week and a half — a marked improvement from the $6,800 the
foundation brought in through art sales during its first year.
Noir Art Emporium sold more work than was expected.
In the beginning, he didn’t expect to sell anything, Cox says, but
the gallery has sold something at almost every show. The Imagine Foundation’s growth spurt and
popularity has led to other successful arts endeavors, including camps for
children; Art and Dine, which features a gallery talk by the featured
artist and a four-course meal; an evening of music dubbed “Night at
the Opera”; and a reworking of the foundation’s first
full-scale project, the Hot Summer Arts Festival, into a Plein-Air
Festival.
“The thing is, you’ve got to support each
other and you have to be in it together,” Lynd-Porter says.
“We need the Eclectic, and we need the Noir and
Jacksonville Art Glass and the Three Legged Dog and On the Wall, because it
will drop off if there are fewer places to go.”
Sean Meek was in the market for a building, something
downtown that would serve as an investment. At the same time, his wife,
Deea Meek, had her nose in The Artist’s
Way: A Spiritual
Path to Higher Creativity, a bestselling tome
about awakening the creative spirit. In August, Sean, a sculptor, and Deea, a mixed-media
artist, moved into a three-story building on East Central Park Plaza, and
the Eclectic Artists Gallery and Co-op was born. The couple hosted an opening in September, and at
that point, Sean Meek says, demand wasn’t great. The Gallery Hop was
just getting started, but Meek’s philosophy is “Everyone is an
artist,” and soon locals began signing up to join the co-op.
“We had relatively good response when we
initially opened. It’s mostly been by word of mouth,” Meek
says. “We chased a few of the artists down. One in particular came
in, and she was carrying a unique purse. My wife commented on it, and the
member responded [that] she made it.”
In the beginning, the Imagine Foundation and the
Eclectic shared the storefront space, but that didn’t last long,
Lynd-Porter says. “Immediately we both went through such a growth
spurt. There was no room, Lynd Porter says. “There was no room for
both of us immediately.”
Right now the co-op consists of 18 members. The
gallery is set up for 36 spaces measuring about 6 feet of wall space each.
The number of pieces fluctuates, Meek says, but at any given time passersby
may see about 100 pieces displayed. “We are trying to make it a community or family
of artists. It is kind of a challenge to get people to take the time to be
part of a co-op,” Meek says. “We try to make it as accessible
as possible without handing out keys to everyone.”
Artists pay $25 a month for a basic membership, which
includes a 6-foot display space, and the artist gets to keep 70 percent of
his or her sales. Members who pay $50 a month get 12 feet of space, a
featured slot once a year, and 80 percent of their earnings. The endeavor isn’t self-sustaining at this
point, but Meek didn’t get into the business to make fistfuls of
cash. “I consider my wife and I members of the co-op,
and our dues are just a little higher than others’,” Meek says.
During the July 6 Gallery Hop, artists and onlookers
mingled in the Eclectic. Abstract oil paintings, mixed-media pieces, and
photography, among other mediums, decorated the white walls and glass cases
throughout the gallery. Noir Art Emporium sits just around the corner. “It was interesting that all of a sudden the
art community started to bloom,” Meek says. Joshua Cox, Guido Strotheide, and Julie Slater,
owners of Noir Art Emporium, were looking for a place to go that
wasn’t a restaurant or dive bar, and when the college friends turned
Jacksonville professionals were stymied in their search, they took matters
into their own hands and looked for a building.
“Originally we found a building around the
corner that the Eclectic is in now, and we thought, ‘that’d be
a great building,’ ” Cox says. “We called up and somebody had just
bought it, and it turns out they were going to put an art gallery there,
and we thought, ‘That’s what we wanted to do.’ ”
The trio decided that there was room for more than
one gallery in town. They went to work on a State Street storefront around
the corner from the Eclectic. When they moved in, Cox, Strotheide, and
Slater found a drop ceiling, carpet, old European furniture in the
basement, and posters advertising computer processors from the 1970s. “We saw the ceiling above and thought
we’d definitely like to open it up, and we assumed there would be
great floors underneath,” Cox says. “We spent all last summer
stripping it out and tearing stuff down.”
The high ceilings, dark wood floors, and open space
seemed destined to house an art space. During the reconstruction phase, the owners came
across the gallery’s first piece of art — a painting of a woman
that now adorns the gallery’s bathroom — under the rubble. “We wanted something completely different in
town; we wanted to make a space that looked different then any other
space,” Cox says. “We were looking for artwork that you
don’t normally see.”
Cox says he looks for work that Jacksonville
residents probably haven’t seen in such media as monoprints,
large-scale oil paintings, sculpture installations, and collages, such as
those in the gallery’s current exhibition, Elizabeth Ferry’s Moving Through the Landscape,
a series of large-scale pieces constructed from such materials as scrap
metal and cardboard. Live music is offered a couple of times a week in the
hope that the gallery will come to serve as a gathering place. “For forever it seemed like the Strawn Gallery
or the colleges would have art openings, and I think they only started the
hop one month before we opened anyway, so it kind of, all the pieces sort
of fell together at once, it seemed like,” Slater says. “We
must have caught on the wave right at the beginning of it,” Cox says.
“I think there was always an undercurrent in town of people who
wanted to get something going but never really knew how to do
it.”
The how-to of finding warm bodies to populate a
vibrant arts scene can be tricky. Lynd-Porter now refers to
Foundation’s foray into a musical event, dubbed the Jazz Brunch, as
“the Jazz Brunch from hell” because the turnout was so dismal.
Imagine Foundation buried the failed Sunday-afternoon
event and learned a little something about Jacksonville’s
entertainment preferences in the process: The town’s denizens
don’t want to spend early Sunday afternoons at the Asa Talcott House.
In a city, Hall says, Sunday afternoons might be
great for such an event, but the foundation has to find out what’s
good for Jacksonville. “Some things we’ve done have worked
immediately, and other things we’ve done either haven’t worked
or are taking more time,” Lynd-Porter says.
Jacksonville’s residents seem to like events
they can incorporate into their daily lives, Lynd-Porter says. They like
the comfort of walking around downtown. They like going to
Lonzerotti’s Italia Restaurant to eat Italian cuisine and drink wine.
The central plaza is home to a number of buildings
that need a significant amount of work, but, Meek says, very few structures
are completely vacant.
“There’s definitely a large portion that
need work, and I see that is happening,” Meek says. “It’s
really turning into more of an arts-and-entertainment district.”
Last Thursday a group of downtown-Jacksonville
business owners, including those from Noir, the Eclectic, and Jacksonville
Art Glass, got together to shoot a video depicting revitalization efforts
for a contest run by an international housewares corporation, which was
asking for videos of budding main streets from around the country. The
prize is $50,000 in merchandise and $5,000 in cash.
Imagine Foundation showcases the work of a blend of
local artists and such out-of-towners as Sergio Gomez from Chicago’s
Gallery 33 and a few Wisconsin-based artists. Many of the visiting artists
notice Jacksonville’s artist-friendly atmosphere.
“This is a great community for welcoming
artists,” Lynd-Porter says. “One of the guys from Wisconsin now
calls Jacksonville his vacation home.”
Jake Sorrill, an Imagine Foundation intern and local
photographer, says that the opportunities he’s been afforded in
Jacksonville wouldn’t be the same if he lived in a larger city.
Sorrill, just 17 years old, has seen the value of his work triple in some
cases and has already had his first adult art show.
Baltimore transplant and trained classical singer
Joel Tinsley has his own success story. After Tinsley moved to
Jacksonville, the foundation began employing him as music director, and now
when he’s not performing Shakespeare for preschools he’s
hosting “Night at the Opera” at the Asa Talcott House.
“We employ bands in the area for the different
functions we have,” Tinsley says. “The musicians as well as the
artists are constantly coming in and introducing new things to
us.”
“What we seem to do well is to create a
community for artists and musicians and performers that makes them feel
happy,” Lynd-Porter says. “When we do that, the community wants
to come watch it. That seems to really be our niche.”
Lynd-Porter says she isn’t shooting for a goal
with regard to the number of galleries, just stability and predictability,
and she’s not rushing the small community along: “It will grow
as it grows.”
Meek says that although the Eclectic isn’t
profitable, he and Deea knew that it wouldn’t make money, and that
wasn’t the goal when they started the labor of love anyway. Noir Art
Emporium owner Cox says that the lounge aspect of the business hasn’t
taken off as hoped, but he and his fellow owners have plans in the works
for a movie day to encourage visitors. “This town has been incredible,” says
Lynd-Porter. “We really can do anything we want, if we can work out
the money.”
Contact Marissa Monson at
mmonson@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Jul 19-25, 2007.
