Making the Artist Community
Reflections on my new studio building and organizing my first public event.
When I moved to Tennessee last year, I assumed I would find a studio inside one of those old industrial warehouses that become rental space for artists. Philadelphia is littered with these old brick manufacturing buildings, often owned by art school graduates who bought up real estate once they realized how financially fraught the life of a working artist would be.
When I got to Chattanooga, I was surprised to find that artists here gravitate to another kind of building entirely: the church.
As Americans grow increasingly secular, a lot of churches in the Bible Belt have struggled to keep their doors open. Some church buildings in Chattanooga are entirely abandoned, after their congregations split over differences or simply shrank into obscurity. Other buildings take the approach of renting out their basements and spare rooms to anyone who will pay the bills. After Sunday services, these storied old spaces transform into venues for music performances, community groups, and of course, artists.
The young, creative, often queer community that gathers inside these old churches makes for a strange and irreverent scene. With all its apparent contradictions, it feels effortless in practice. I’m lucky to be a part of one of these places.
I found my new studio space at St. Andrew’s Center, an old Methodist church built sometime in the late 19th century. The building is seemingly held together by one man, Terry Miller, who is unlike any landlord I’ve ever known. He’s omnipresent at the church, putting hours into an endless list of maintenance tasks, moving energetically across creaky floorboards and bumping music around the labyrinthian hallways. When I first came to visit my soon-to-be studio, Terry explained something like, “I just want to see people in here doing dope shit.”
We passed by rooms where the different tenants—or building partners, as Terry prefers to say—made their studios. There were partners who made costumes, painted, danced, designed textiles, tailored clothing, and made music. Some rooms hosted sobriety groups, others were meditation studios. Outside the church, a food fridge stored free meals for hungry people, and in the basement I discovered Gaining Ground: a tiny grocery store offering local produce, meat, and dairy to the Highland Park neighborhood.
Although it’s no longer strictly a church, a rotating cast of congregations takes turns renting out the sanctuary, including a Spanish-speaking Pentecostal group.
Like many of the best things in Chattanooga, the happenings at St. Andrew’s tend to spread by word of mouth. After a few weeks of settling into my space, I felt anxious to meet the other tenants in the building, so I started organizing an open studio night.
Over my near-decade of living in Philly, some of my favorite memories within the art community happened at the “Vox building.” On first Fridays of every month, artists of all ages would pack into the big studio building where Vox Populi gallery occupied an entire floor. Upstairs, a floor of smaller galleries like Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Marginal Utility also opened their doors and sold cheap beers. Even in the hottest summer months, artists packed in like sardines, shaking hands and sweating on each other.
I told Danny Orrendorf, the lead curator of Vox at the time, that I envied the gallery’s ability to bring people together. He shrugged and said, “we just throw parties!” in a way that made it sound so easy.
So, that’s what I tried last week at St. Andrew’s — I got a big box of Miller High Life and we threw our own party. The building partners opened their doors, the public came out, and we took some baby steps toward socializing as an artist community. It was a really wonderful night. Being an artist can be so lonely, it’s easy to forget that there are so many of us out here and that we have nearly everything in common.
Although repurposed churches like St. Andrew’s are beloved Chattanooga fixtures, their position in the city always feels a little fraught. The neighborhood around the beautiful old building is gentrifying rapidly, with a sprawling megachurch called Redemption eating up the surrounding lots. For every landlord like Terry who carefully stewards their building without much concern for turning a profit, there is a hungry developer watching the property value go up.
I don’t know how much my actions affect the future of St. Andrews, or the lives of other artists in the city, but it feels important to get people together at a time when everything feels so alienated and lonely. I’m hoping to organize more open studio events; at least twice a year for now. Maybe if we grow enough, we can have our own party every First Friday. Who knows what will happen if we just keep making room for things to grow.
Labor Intensive Recommendations:
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.
Truck Farm - a short film I watched this morning about urban farming.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer — this book changed the way I thought about nature and partly inspired my move back to my home environment.
Sounds like an incredible breeding ground for ideas of all persuasions to develop and grow.
I love the transformation of the church buildings from places of worship to tiny enclaves of artist development.
The picture of Will Sutton in front of his painting presents an interesting dichotomy: a dark blue, black and red painting featuring skulls and tiny creatures in the background and the foreground of artist who looks to be an All American, if not choir boy, at least someone with family ties to the church--perhaps the church that now serves as artist breeding ground.
Great write up and i loved reading it.