Yesterday I presented the CommonPlace Arts proposal to the Downtown Business Association of Charlottesville and got a full vote of support! Guess it’s time to get things rolling… Next step is to talk to specific property owners about spaces we can use.
Stay tuned for updates as I go about identifying properties and artists to incorporate into the project. Let me know if you’re interested in getting involved and be sure to follow @commonplacearts on Twitter!
I would love to see community members submit their favorite found doodles so a storefront could be like Charlottesville’s Refrigerator Door of whimsy and lo-fi drawing!
I have a source of really good information for you. I lived in England for five years up until March of 2010, and they have had a very active organization doing the empty shops thing. The main organizer’s name is Dan Thompson and his e-mail is dan@artistsandmakers.com and he’s also on twitter. If you follow me on twitter, I’m djcnorwich, and I’ll soon have a tweet from him and be able to give you his twitter ID. The English emptyshops group also had an active yahoo group, the e-mail of which is emptyshops@yahoogroups.com and Dan’s website, http://www.artistsandmakers.com reports on what’s going on in empty shops activities all over England. He would be very interested in hearing about the new one here. Just after I moved here, I wrote a letter to C’ville about it which was published. Did you perhaps read it and get inspired? I’d be very VERY interested in getting involved with Charlottesville’s version as I am a textile designer and I’ve got some ideas I’ve wanted to bring into being.
This sounds great! Thanks for passing along the info.
The idea for CommonPlace Arts started back in 2006 when I was making the daily walk down West Main Street to get to UVa from downtown. I couldn’t help but think that all the empty spaces that I passed on that walk were detracting from the possibility for more vitality (both social and economic) in the area. I moved away from Charlottesville shortly after that, but the idea stuck with me and I talked with people in other cities who ran public and storefront art programs. When I returned to town in 2009, I started putting the foundation in place for this project with a huge amount of support from friends, family, and other folks in the community. And here we are…