Building Imagination Initiative
Re-imagining the Central Valley
September is a busy month in art and architecture for the Modesto Art Museum. The Building Imagination Center will open in September on Tenth Street. At the invitation of CSU Stanislaus, MAM will move into the Center at 1009 J Street. The center includes a movie making lab and theatre. The 5th annual Modesto International Architecture Festival is 9 days of events, activities, movies, tours, talks, and workshops that will run September 15 – 23, 2012.
The Building Imagination Center — a partnership between the Building Imagination Initiative, California State University (CSU), Stanislaus and the Modesto Art Museum — has announced the schedule of events for its mid-September opening.
• Sept. 15, 2012: Starting point for a one-hour guided tour of downtown Modesto modernist buildings, as part of the Modesto International Architecture Festival (Beginning at 10:30 a.m.).
• Sept. 18, 2012: CSU Stanislaus assistant professor Dr. Staci Gem Scheiwiller explores the mingling of traditions that created Islamic architecture, in a lecture entitled “Architectural Hybridities: Pagan, Christian, Islamic, or all the above?” (Beginning at 7:30 p.m.).
• Sept. 20, 2012: Guests welcomed during Modesto’s Third Thursday Art Walk.
The events are free and open to the public.
ArtPlace spoke with Jessica Gomula-Kruzic, Director for the Building Imagination Center, about the goals of the Center and the downtown art scene in Modesto, CA.
ARTPLACE: What is your elevator pitch when you describe your project to people?
GOMULA-KRUZIC: We are transforming a vacant storefront in downtown Modesto into the Building Imagination Center, a space for video and visual arts exhibitions, arts education, and artist residencies.
The Center will provide a link between CSU Stanislaus, the Modesto Art Museum, and Modesto’s downtown cultural district. It will provide a physical space for exhibiting visual arts in a non-commercial gallery, and will regularly host visual arts programming through the Modesto Art Museum’s Building a Better Modesto program. The Center will host video screenings and visual art receptions which will coincide with the downtown ArtWalk.
Using a relaxed “48-hour documentary filmmaking” model, resident artists will work with community groups to create original documentaries, using CSU Stanislaus students as cinematographers. Community members will be an integral part of the production process. Half of the resident artists will be CSU alumni, encouraging them to stay in the area and building a bridge between their academic and professional careers.
While immortalized in the film American Graffiti, of late Modesto’s charm has been tarnished by high rates of foreclosure, unemployment (16.7%) , and crime. Last year it placed nineteenth in Forbes Magazine’s list of the nation’s most miserable cities.
ArtPlace’s grant to the Creative Work Fund allowed us to award grants to five new place-based projects in locations where need is high and grant opportunities are limited. One such Creative Work Fund grant supports a partnership among media artists Jessica Gomula-Kruzic and Steve Arounsack with the Modesto Art Museum. The partners are making a film about one of Modesto’s distinctive but forgotten assets—its remarkable stock of mid-century modernist buildings.
Like many United States cities, Modesto enjoyed a building boom after World War II. According to architect and writer Kiel Famellos-Schmidt, “All of the major civic buildings date to the post war boom. Glass, steel, aluminum, exposed aggregate concrete, and terra cotta sun screens structure these buildings.” While its public buildings are noteworthy, it’s Modesto’s modernist homes that drew national attention. The Heckendorf Residence, designed by John Funk in 1939, set the city’s modernist movement in motion.
There is a great deal of excitement in Modesto about the Art Place grant to open a new art center in our community. In addition to several news articles featuring the Building Imagination Center (Modesto Bee, Central Valley Business Journal, Central Valley Business Times, James Irvine Foundation, ArchDaily), we have also received volunteer offers to participate in the program from civic leaders and the community- at- large.
The new Center will be located in the heart of downtown Modesto, next to several other arts organizations, including the 1600-seat Gallo Center for the Arts. Yet, despite its proximity to this regional arts attraction, the area in which the Center is located is currently half vacant. Currently the University is securing the lease agreement and all the necessary paperwork to help us to gain access to the building as soon as possible.
But, while the negotiations have been taking place in the background, we have been actively working in the foreground, getting bids from various contractors to provide services such as:
In addition to addressing the physical remodeling of the existing site, we have also been busy:
Naturally, this preliminary down time has led to a great deal of brainstorming and realistic ideation about how to make our space as functional and flexible as possible. Having different sections of the Center perform multiple uses is an absolute necessity, and making sure that we have the infrastructure there to support all of those needs is of paramount importance.
One of the primary needs of the space include a visual arts gallery. The Center will be the physical embodiment of the Modesto Art Museum, the only visual arts museum in the city. For the Museum to be able to offer historical and contemporary masterpieces for public viewing it must be able to provide a secure and professional location. Currently the Museum is arranging several exhibits for the Center, with the opening exhibit featuring architectural photographs, renderings, and models as part of the 5th annual Modesto International Architecture Festival. Accompanying this opening exhibit will be several community forums, lectures, tours, and the architecture festival’s opening night gala.
The Center will also be a hub of community activity through its Resident Filmmaker Program. This program is the cornerstone of the Center’s vision on creating real and permanent change in the community. The program will create a cycle of empowerment by having CSU Stanislaus students serve as the film crew for regional filmmakers. These filmmakers will work with local community groups to create short form documentaries about their community work. These films will create a personal bridge between the community, the students, and the filmmakers. In turn, the community groups, and the public at large, will be able to attend free video training workshops to increase their own marketable skills. Half of the resident filmmakers will be alumni from CSU Stanislaus, providing a reason for them to remain in the area after graduation. All of the staff employed by the center will also be either current students from CSU Stanislaus, or recent graduates.
The Building Imagination Center is planning its grand opening to coincide with the Third Thursday ArtWalk in Modesto, September 20.
A new wave of creative placemaking is underway as part of ArtPlace, an innovative partnership model of foundations, corporations and government agencies that supports community building through the arts. Irvine is pleased to support this unique program for the second year in a row, having contributed $2 million to ArtPlace to support California-based projects among those supported nationally by the initiative.
ArtPlace was created in 2010 as a partnership among 11 foundations, six banks and eight federal agencies (including the National Endowment for the Arts) to transform urban and rural communities throughout the country by using the arts as an economic driver. To date, the initiative has raised more than $50 million in support of the various projects. The most recent cycle of grants, announced Monday, provides $15.4 million in support of 47 projects that were chosen out of more than 2,200 letters of inquiry. Six of those 47 projects will take place in California.
The approach being taken by ArtPlace, known as “creative placemaking,” has emerged over the past 20 years as a promising way to increase the vitality of communities and help them grow. Irvine is pleased to support this partnership because of ArtPlace’s resonance with our belief that the arts create meaningful ongoing “bridging and bonding” connections among Californians, fostering a vibrant, inclusive society. In 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts built on its two decades of work in creative placemaking by announcing the first grants in its new Our Town program, designed to support public-private partnerships to strengthen the arts while energizing the overall community. ArtPlace takes this movement a step further, as the first major public-private partnership to encourage creative placemaking across America.
MODESTO – A vacant downtown Modesto storefront is the home of a future video arts center that will be used to create documentary films about the area and draw crowds to the downtown area.
The Building Imagination Gallery and Cinema, or BIG Cinema, will be possible due to several grants, including a “significant grant” from ArtPlace announced earlier this week….
The center will be located across from the Gallo Center for the Arts and will focus on the creation of new and original documentary films about the local community, and involving community members in the production. Training in video editing and production will keep the center going at all hours, and indoor and outdoor video screenings will attract new attention and new crowds to the half-vacant 10th Street.
“Across the country, cities and towns are using the arts to help shape their social, physical and economic characters,” National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman. “The arts are a part of everyday life, and I am thrilled to see yet another example of an arts organization working with city, state, and federal offices to help strengthen and revitalize their communities through the arts. It is wonderful that ArtPlace and its funders have recognized this work and invested in it so generously.”
A video installation at SSSHHHH!, Alameda Library, March 3, 2012. Live Audio by Negativwobblyland www.negativland.com & Kadet Kuhne www.tektonicshift.com
Friday, May 13, 2011.
An evening of live music and video performances with the Illuminated Corridor.
Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.
Installation of //Bii: Water with live video component.