Arts
Dinnerware Fixed on Sixth Street
by Anne Seidler
innerware Contemporary Art Gallery has occupied several locations since its opening in 1979. One of the first non-profit galleries in the country, Dinnerware began as a small collection of paintings in a law office before becoming a full-fledged gallery at Congress Street and Fifth Avenue. For several years, Dinnerware occupied 135 E. Congress St., before selling the building to Wilde Playhouse and relocating to Fourth Avenue. Now Dinnerware is moving back downtown. Rather than returning to the Congress Street area, however, the gallery will move to the Historic Warehouse District, occupying a space in the Steinfeld Warehouse at 101 W. Sixth St. The move should help establish the area between North. Sixth Avenue. and East Toole Avenue. as the center of the Tucson arts scene, as well as increasing Dinnerware’s potential as a resource for artists.
The gallery hopes that Sixth Street’s coalescence of art spaces will make it somewhat of a new gallery district: what Congress Street was supposed to be. Davis Dominguez, Tucson’s largest contemporary art gallery, occupies a warehouse space at Sixth and Sixth, and several smaller galleries – Fala Collections, Platform, and Raices Taller – are located along the same stretch of Sixth Street. Dinnerware’s Executive Director, Blake Shell, looks forward to being in close proximity to other important spaces and building a true arts district. “It’s great to link up these galleries in the Historic Warehouse District,” she says; “to have us come together and be right in the center of things.”
Dinnerware President David Aguirre emphasizes the dynamic feel of the warehouse district as a center of arts production. “Here on Fourth Avenue, we’re in the middle of a retail zone,” he says. “The Historic Warehouse District is the county’s arts production zone: a kind of ground zero.” Many artists have their studio spaces in the area, including the Steinfeld Warehouse itself. The space that the new Dinnerware Gallery will occupy is a former sculpture studio and gallery, and Aguirre’s own ceramics studio is adjacent to the new Dinnerware Gallery space. Shell says that she and Dinnerware’s other directors are looking forward to reopening the gallery in this dynamic environment where there is already a group of artists working. At its new location, Dinnerware will be on the route of the Tucson Arts District ArtWalk, a tour of downtown art spaces, as well as an upcoming Historic Warehouse District Tour.
Besides galleries and studio spaces, the warehouse district has long been home to Bicas (Bicycle Inter-Community Art and Salvage), located at 44 W. Sixth St., and the headquarters of Flam Chen Pyrotechnic Theater. Flam Chen has frequently used the train platforms located just outside the Steinfeld Warehouse for its incendiary shows, and Aguirre says he hopes to encourage more performance artists to use the platforms as a venue.
The square footage of the new gallery space is comparable to that of Dinnerware’s current Fourth Avenue location, with the added asset of a loft space which will be used as an Art Resource Center. This space will provide computers, books, and publications for artists who want to accelerate their careers. “Artists who are new to Tucson, who maybe don’t even have access to the Internet, just don’t even know what’s out there,” says Shell. “So we’ll have computer stations for artists and students to look up galleries, studios, grants, residencies…It’ll be a great resource.” The directors of Dinnerware plan on facilitating panel discussions at the Art Resource Center that will help artists with everything from photographing their artwork to obtaining health insurance. Dinnerware’s directors hope that the Steinfeld Warehouse space will help Dinnerware fulfill its goal of being as much a source of support for artists as a place for them to sell their work.
Dinnerware will open in its new neighborhood on September 3rd. “Vanishing Points”, the first exhibition at the new location, will feature the work of Michael Sherwin and Peter HappelChristian, two conceptual photography-based artists. Dinnerware’s move to the warehouse district may be the natural last step in a trend to make the area the focal point of Tucson’s art scene. With its latest relocation, one of Tucson’s oldest art galleries seems to have found a perfect niche.
n June 4th, several local artists met some Santa Rosa neighborhood kids in the park on a sweltering Saturday morning. Santa Rosa abuts Barrio Viejo to the south of downtown; in fact, most people don’t even know these neighborhoods as distinct from each other, and in this case, the two blended as the arty sensibilities of Barrio bohos met the young members of the Santa Rosa Recreation Center’s Double Digit club. The early heat wave nothwithstanding, everyone joked and laughed and ran around as the legendary neighborhood guinea hens pranced up to, but thankfully not upon, the art being chalked onto the concrete of Santa Rosa Park.
For the June 4 event, the Double Digit kids assisted several artists in rendering their hybridized version of I Madonnari, which traditionally decorated the squares of Europe with images of the Madonna. Artists Cait Ni Sioman, Mat Cotton, and Gwyneth Scally’s renditions of Da Vinci side-by-side were a sight to behold, but perhaps more amazing for having seen their construction; chalk rendering is quick and disposable, and watching Scally’s process of shading a Madonna’s face and neck looked like painstaking oil work thrown onto the street and sped up to 78 rpm. Artist Ignacio Garcia stole the kids’ hearts with his “Our Lady of Mona Lisa”, which comfortably wedded art old and new into a memorable if ephemeral art event. Leia Maahs employed design elements from San Xavier Del Bac into the headpiece of the installation to much effect, solidifying the aesthetic link between the here and now and old world Renaissance Italy.