Community Lending Libraries - Hacking together a makeshift community art project.
Repair cafes, bike shares, landing libraries, and the art mobile. Building rural whirlymobiles to connect rural artists.
Setting:
The repair cafe. 9:00 am. Cobbled together wooden tables littered with tools and spare parts fill a garage along the rural Trunk 10. Around the back the garage door is rolled open, energy and creativity tumbling out into the rails-to-trails path that runs through the land. The repair cafe has its radio playing, its lights beaming, the methodic hum of a router buzzing. There are a handful of people inside, working away on fixing up their old tools, replacing equipment in the art library, and charging their phones on the off grid solar panels.
Script:
The RADIO OPERATOR sits fiddling with the antenna, turning nobs and listening for the Station 644 to poke through the static. “Saturday morning folks, Repair Cafe is open for their weekly ‘hack it and crack’ it open door days. Bring your busted up vacuums, jammed mowers, and broken hearts and get ready to meet some of your local fags dykes and everything bikes.”
Action:
A tag team cargo bike zips along the multipurpose trail. Its one of the Everything Bikes on loan from the Repair Cafe - a collage of old tractor parts, thrown out bus seats, and repurposed sign posts. Pulling a bale of hay in its trailer, the Everything Bike skids right through the open garage doors, HOOTs and BEEPs tumbling out of the megaphone.
Repairing the Arts Granting System Three Modest Proposals:
As part of my ongoing art practice, I am looking for ways to detangle myself from the art granting system. Reliant on government funding and prohibitively labour intensive requirements including lengthy written proposals and experience in paid galleries, grants often feel unsustainable and extractive. With strong writing skills required, I often see talented and dedicated artists get rejected - their downfall is spending too much time on their art, and not enough time writing about it.
Proposal 1: Classifieds - ISO other artist to merge creative juices with.
Concluding the many hours of grant writing meticulously pitching and convincing others (and myself) of a project, I’m met with grief and sadness that a project I am now thoroughly invested in, has to wait months before germination. I often find myself feeling lonely with my work in these times, wishing that there were others collaborating and incubating these ideas with me. Wishing I didn’t have to sit on this idea, but instead nurture it the right now.
There is a fantasy I have when I submit a grant, that someone behind the scenes might reach out to me and say “Hey Nike, I read your proposal, it sounds like your project would work a lot better if you collaborated with this other artist you might not have heard of.” A blind date with a fellow artist. A curated art collaboration and friendship. I want to work with someone whose ideas are as free to rob as my own. Someone who sees this work as collective who wants to chatter back and forth excitedly, swapping suggestions and edits until who came up with what is blurred. I wanna be set up with other artists.
If you like the artist’s proposal below, swipe right to open yourself to the artistic collaboration of your dreams.
ISO: A fellow artist(s) to make stuff together.
You: a maker, performance artist, facilitator, party host, hot glue master
Me: I tell you about my dreams to have an Eating Out In Public installation. Under the structure of blue and orange scaffolding, sewn together banners, and repurposed sheets as shade canopies, we pull together a large outdoor dinning performance.
You: ask me what we’ll eat out
Me: That scene in Hook when they have a food fight, fueled by imagination. Or maybe each other. Or maybe we’ll eat cardboard carrots and knitted broccolis.
You: ask me who will come.
Me: All the trans birds and slugs across the shore. We’ll stage it at the beach, in the woods, in a mall. Set up in an instant and disappear within the hour.
You then propose a series of edits.
We propose our idea to some place that will give us money to make it happen. Or maybe we’ll just dream it up imagine it like the lost boys did.
Proposal 2: CSAs Community Supported Arts
Ingredients:
1 rural community hall to host an art show. Something accessible and uber gay. Can even be virtual.
Group of rural queer artists who are dying to show their work
CSA Tickets (Sliding scale)
Instructions:
Once all of the art is exhibited, presented, shown, etc., have the audience or public make votes with their tickets on their favourite piece of art work.
Count tickets, the top art pieces are now owned by the community as part of a Community Supported Arts Collection.
Pay artists their $$ earned from ticket sales.
Members of the community can visit or borrow the art to display in their homes on special occasions, feature them at parties, or carry them in protests.
This recipe is an old family favourite. My grandmother probably made something like this but never used measurements and definitely wouldn’t have called it mutual aid or the solidarity economy.
Proposal 3: The Art Mobile
The Art Mobile - hosted in a small cute aesthetic truck from Italy or Japan the art mobile is a tiny rural storage space. Filled with an assortment of supplies, tools, and instruction manuals. Paid by a membership fee, or through donations to cover the cost of the truck, gas, and replacing any broken or worn out supplies. The Art Mobile is a library of equipment including tools for linocut, woodworking, sewing, crochet, painting, sculpture, screen-printing, weaving, etc. The Art Mobile is run by volunteers, and parks itself at certain easily accessible locations throughout the week, making special trips for workshops, demonstrations, and classes.
These proposals emerge from a desire to see more artistic collaborations in rural areas and to find ways to pay for art that is supported by community.