Cities help artists find right fit

(Updated, July 25, 9 a.m.)
Picture this: You’re a Providence-area artist seeking studio space to rent near your neighborhood. Or maybe you’re a developer looking to open a studio or gallery where others could make and display their work.
In either case you’ve got two major options, each with similarities, benefits and downsides.
“The plus in Pawtucket is price. The plus in Providence is name recognition,” said Len Lavoie, owner of Rhode Island Commercial Industry Realty in Pawtucket. “Other than that, it doesn’t really make any difference.”
While Lavoie, who has more than 20 years of experience helping building developers and artists choose between the two cities, may be able sum up the most polarizing difference in opening a studio in Pawtucket versus Providence, the decision for artists often goes deeper.
And it isn’t always an easy one.
Pawtucket’s Mad Dog Artist Studios and Gallery, run by the Garnett family, a foursome who between them are artists and salespeople, is the most recent addition to the growing number of studios in the two communities.
“There are so many groups around here and Pawtucket is extremely supportive of new businesses, especially if you’re in the arts and entertainment [industry],” said Christina Garnett, 32. Earlier this month she opened Mad Dog studios with her father, Norval, mother Karen, and sister, Amanda Amoroso, 27, a ceramics artist. “As a new business owner, you can’t afford to run into any delays. They want new businesses and they get it.”
Garnett, with a background in sales, is running marketing efforts. An offer on Living Social, the popular coupon website, for a free month of membership, brought her family’s Blackstone Avenue business five new members within 24 hours.
But the Garnetts are relying largely on word-of-mouth within the city’s arts community, which was a major draw in their decision to locate the business there.
Anchor, a partnership between Matt Grigsby, a Rhode Island School of Design grad, and Asher Dunn, a woodworker, opened last year in Providence’s West End.
“When we were looking, we looked at 16 or 18 spaces and places in Pawtucket, too,” Grigsby said. “[How we chose] is a good question.
“I think the community in Providence is just stronger. People look out for each other more,” Grigsby said.
The price also happened to be right for Grigsby and Dunn. They leased their space in early 2011, getting in “while it was still cheap,” Grigsby said. Anchor charges tenants, made up of artists and professionals renting small offices, $250 per month inclusively.
Mad Dog studios charges $90 per month for open membership, which can be renewed monthly, that gives artists access to studio space three days per week.
Private flex-space memberships there are $270 per month and require a three-month commitment.
Pawtucket and Providence were early embracers of a late 1990s movement to establish and promote collective artist spaces that not only lifted a city’s cultural appeal but also its economic viability.
By treating artists as small-business owners and helping to foster their ventures, cities were able to draw them as renters and manufacturers, which, in this area, helped to fill a void left by the disappearing textile and jewelry industries.
“We saw this trend,” said Herb Weiss, economic and cultural affairs officer for Pawtucket. “The trend was utilizing mills to [court] small businesses and creative-sector companies. Instead of getting one large company, [cities] got dozens of small companies.”
The General Assembly has since approved districts in seven other communities.
Artists who live and work in those areas are exempt from state sales tax on work created there, state personal income tax on the sale of that work, and from state sales tax on one-of-a-kind works sold in gallery spaces within a district no matter where the work was created.
Arts districts also exist in Westerly, Woonsocket, Tiverton, Little Compton, Newport, Warwick and Warren.
Providence’s arts and entertainment district was established by legislation proposed in 1996 by then-Mayor Vincent “Buddy” Cianci Jr. that set its boundaries from Dorrance to Sabin, Empire and Pine streets.
Cianci’s proposal came from a master plan for Downcity established two years before.
A second arts district was created in the city’s Valley, Olneyville and West Broadway neighborhoods, which make up the West End, in July 2005.
“Our spaces are primarily live-work spaces,” said Lynne McCormack, director of art, culture, and tourism for Providence. “The way Providence has dealt [with the issue] has been in response to … the artists empowering themselves to take action and create spaces that always would be for artists. I think when you look at Pawtucket, you see wonderful spaces. The main difference [from Providence] … is they tend to be higher-end mill space that has been renovated.” Pawtucket’s 307-acre zone, encompassing 23 mills, was created in 1999.
After earning a degree in industrial design from RISD in 2005, Grigsby shared a series of spaces with other artists and professionals in both Pawtucket and Providence before teaming up with Dunn, whom he knew through the RISD community.
Dunn at the time was running a wood shop at Hope Artiste Village, one of Pawtucket’s most prominent artist collaboratives erected in the former Hope Webbing Co. mill on Main Street.
Hope Artiste Village “gallerist” and art consultant Candita Clayton opened Candita Clayton Studio there two years ago.
She had been focusing before that on her work in sustainable-living design and looked in Pawtucket and Providence for space to mix that and art.
“I became a gallery almost by accident,” Clayton said. “I fell in love with the space.”
The districts in the two cities enjoy similar characteristics, including a lively theater scene.
The Providence Performing Arts Center and Trinity Repertory Company are both in Downcity. The Gamm Theater, founded in Providence in 1984, moved into the Pawtucket Armory building within the arts district, in 2003 after reportedly not finding a suitable expansion space in Providence.
The Providence Arts Festival, organized by In Downcity, a community-style group of local merchants, and Cornish Associates, a Providence real estate development firm, has been taking place along Westminster Street downtown for years, though it was canceled due to rain this year.
The Pawtucket Arts Festival, begun in 1999, will be held Sept. 8 through Sept. 30.
“One of the tell-tale signs of how our mill town supported the arts is that we started with the festival in 1999 with a $15,000 budget,” Weiss said. Last year it was more than $150,000.”
Counting in-kind donations, this year’s budget is around $300,000.
Mad Dog studios plans a grand opening that same month. Along with the city’s strong support for the arts, Christina Garnett says the studio’s “right-off-the-highway” location was another major selling point.
“It was just getting the right spot for what we had in mind,” she said.

In the original, July 23 release of this article, the dates of the Pawtucket Arts Festival were printed as Sept. 8 and Sept. 9 rather than Sept. 8 to Sept. 30.

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