Building Imagination Initiative
Re-imagining the Central Valley
As part of the fifth annual Modesto International Architecture Festival, the Building Imagination Center hosted a PARK(ing) Day event.
PARK(ing) Day is an annual worldwide event where artists, designers, landscape architects, and citizens transform metered parking spots into temporary public parks.
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.
PLAY, the Building Imagination Initiative’s Alternate Reality Game was invited to join San Jose’s 2012 ZERO1 Emerging Artist Network.
Join the game and become your own superhero!
Superheroes solve all types of quality of life issues in real and fantastical ways – and you can even get your own trading card!
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.”
10 am, March 28. Saletta Studios, Oakdale, CA.
Come and join us at the March meeting of the Modesto Pen Women where JGomula will be presenting her talk Art, ARGs, and Social Activism. Digital games are widely used and played to address pressing social issues, producing sustainable and positive impacts within our society. In the //Building Imagination Initiative’s Alternate Reality Game, each participant chooses a Mission to participate in. Missions revolve around creating imaginative art based solutions to Modesto’s livability issues: Education, Employment, Crime, Health Care, Housing, Transportation, Leisure, Arts & Culture, Quality of Life.
Saturday, September 17th, 2011, 7-9 pm.
Chartreuse Muse Gallery.
Downtown Modesto, CA.
Architecture Graffiti is sponsored by the //Bii, the Modesto Art Museum, and the Modesto International Architecture Festival to create this public outreach opportunity, a VIP (Valley Illumination & Performance) event. Working with unlikely natural and built spaces, VIP events are a public art project that creates site-specific illumination of public space, catalyzing site-specific work, integrating audience interaction and live video, and showcasing diverse collaborations between performative projectionists and musicians. VIP events are a powerful, yet non-displacing, way to creatively claim and transform public spaces with inventive, provocative, and immersive events of light and sound.
Participating artists include work by Sean Clute; work by Spirit of Space; Submerged by Jessica Gomula; Wealth by Julie Strong, Brittney Miller, Alyssa Martinez
Public support of this project was excellent, with over 100 people attending.
Thursday, August 18th, 7 pm.
Artist Reception at Crow Trading, 1208 J st. Modesto.
Installation of the 125 “larger than life” black and white portraits from //Bii: Meet Your Neighbor.
Various locations throughout downtown Modesto, including over 35 storefronts.
With support from the Modesto Art Museum.
Exhibition runs from August 4th – September 18th, 2011.
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Installation of //Bii: Submerged as part of Veritable Vicissitudes: As the audience enters, they find themselves in a maze of scrim through which they may travel. Live sound and video projections echo through the maze while creating overlays of light and moving shadows on the hanging scrim walls. Sharing the maze are several dancers with headlamps. The goal of each performance installation listed below is to create a sensorial playground for artists and audience alike. In these environments, the audience can experience and often interact with dance, music, video and other art genres in an intimate, 360-degree manner. Through interactive systems, the audience and artists can co-create the performance.
