Billionaire Paul Allen’s “city within a city, where lively
workplaces, shops, restaurants, schools, parks, entertainment, and
recreation are located in a dynamic, emerging neighbor-hood” is once
again forcing out the arts. Allen’s plan for South Lake Union, once
touted as a developing arts and technology hub, is instead turning into
a designer playground for the rich. 911 Media Arts Center, like
independent arts groups Consolidated Works and Center on Contemporary
Art before it, can no longer afford the rent it pays to Allen’s company
Vulcan. At the end of the month, 911 is moving out of the spacious old
industrial building on Ninth Avenue North that it’s occupied for five
years, and into an upstairs office space a fifth of the size—with
no theater or gallery—in the University District.
At the same time, the precarious little nonprofit—you could
say fragile, you could say agile—is celebrating its 25th
anniversary on August 14 by throwing a big party and vowing to go
forward. “The long and short of it is, we’re in secure financial shape,
we’re changing spaces for a variety of reasons, and the organization
will still be around,” said Kurt Kiefer, one of eight board members
overseeing the center’s skeleton crew of three. But, he added, “Right
now we’re sort of feeling our way.”
Anne Focke, who in 1974 founded and/or, the contemporary arts center
that spawned 911, has for years asserted that organizations, like
people, should die natural deaths. She killed and/or herself. Is 911’s
time up? Focke doesn’t know. She’s not on the board, and she hasn’t
been involved in the organization for decades, but she’s curious. “It
could be one of those great moments where you say, ‘Ah, we need to
shift who we are,'” she says.
911 is worth fighting for. It is a truly noncommercial arts
nonprofit: an increasing rarity. This is the place where James
Longley’s powerful, Academy Award–nominated documentary Iraq
in Fragments was edited; where internationally acclaimed
experimental video artist Gary Hill shows regularly; where Lynn
Shelton, recipient of the “Someone to Watch Award” at the 2009
Independent Spirit Awards and director of this year’s Sundance darling
Humpday, got her start in Seattle, editing alongside Sherman
Alexie. It’s a place of big brains and small pockets, with an annual
operating budget of only $365,000 (by comparison, the Bellevue Arts
Museum recently raised $600,000 from a single night’s dinner and
auction). The list of great minds who have staffed 911 over the years
includes founder Jill Medvedow, now director of the Institute of
Contemporary Art in Boston; Fidelma McGinn, now director of Artist
Trust (another spin-off—along with CoCA, 911, and Artech—of
and/or); and Glenn Weiss, now director of art projects for Times Square
Alliance in New York.
One afternoon last week, the place was
crawling with kids making a pirate movie. 911 is pretty much one-stop
shopping for the making and showing of video, film, and
animation, offering not only classes and workshops at the center and at
schools, but also regular free open-lab times, open-mic screenings,
equipment rentals at cost, and scholarships. The center has 323 active
members, five interns, 12 volunteers, and an adjunct faculty of 35.
It’s a regular recipient of funding from the city, county, state, and
the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
“911 made me feel so much like Seattle was going to be a good place
to be as an artist,” says Shelton, who got her first grant from 911 in
1999, after moving back to her native Seattle from New York. “I
recognized there was a community. It wasn’t even the practical support,
although that was, of course, great. It was the moral support.”
“911 is different, it’s a critique of all the bullshit that we have
to put up with everywhere else in the media,” says another notable
former 911 director, artist/filmmaker Heather Dew Oaksen, who took over
after Medvedow. “Richard Serra said a long time ago, we are the product
delivered to the advertisers. So I think the media center, not only
does it train people to think critically about media literacy, we also
need artists of all stripes to begin to think about how to present
information critically. Media isn’t like sculpture or
painting—you’re not pushing materials around, you’re pushing
people’s brains around.”
911’s last crisis was in 2003, when a no-count board of trustees
pushed out McGinn, and the members revolted. Oaksen returned to the
board for the rescue. Even then, she says, she recognized that paying
rent on a physical space (at the time, 911 was located on Yale Avenue
near REI) was strangling the center and, meanwhile, the virtual world
was becoming more and more important.
The new, “cloudlike” configuration of 911—which will include
more classes at satellite locations, where attendance has been
rising—has promise, Oaksen says.
But artist Hill says 911 Media Arts Center can’t do without the
“center” part. “Who’s that Microsoft guy? Paul Allen? Here you have
these technology places, and they can’t even support the most minimal
multimedia art in Seattle,” Hill says. “Everything can’t be online. For
me, it was always interesting to see people’s work at 911 and talk to
them. You get inspired, you want to go home and make something. Maybe
they can make the place more nomadic, or do something like projecting
on buildings—really turn the thing on its head, like, ‘Okay, if
you’re not going to come here, we’re going to go out there.’ You know,
have events that are really events—be more
event-structured and project-based.”
911’s new home has virtually no public presence, but it’s not just
any office, either: The building is owned by Jack Straw Productions,
the 47-year-old nonprofit multidisciplinary audio arts center, where
director Joan Rabinowitz dreams of creating an arts center. Jack Straw
supports itself in part by renting its spaces, and it happened to have
an opening when 911 was looking. 911 and Jack Straw don’t have any
specific plans together yet, but Jack Straw updated the electrical
capacity of the space for 911 (with a county grant). While the future
is unclear, 911 is doing more than crashing on a couch.
Any organization that finds itself in a crucible moment like this
one would do well to consider the wisdom of and/or founder Focke,
arguably the most artful arts administrator in the history of Seattle.
Of the ideal arts organization (and, by extension, life), she
writes:
It moves lightly. It can change and will change. It avoids codifying
or homogenizing its programs. It observes a few rules of thumb from
James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State: Take small steps, favor
reversibility, plan on surprises and on human inventiveness.
What does this sentence mean?
“She killed and/or herself.”
@1 And/Or was a contemporary art space in Seattle that closed in 1980. There no real traces of it on the internet or I’d provide a link. It was run by Anne Focke, and gave way to 911 Media Arts and COCA. The sentence does read strangely if the reference isn’t clear. Anne is definitely still alive and well living in Seattle.
“and/or” is the name of the organization she killed.
It means she [Anne Focke] personally pulled the plug on the contemporary arts center “and/or” which she had founded.
The reference is in the sentence previous.
Way to STICK IT TO THE MAN, Jen! Damn, that evil billionaire Paul Allen keeps throwin’ arts organizations out into the cold! What’s weird is that the Allen Family Foundation was 911’s biggest single financial contributor for many years, and that devil Vulcan subsidized 911’s space in S. Lake Union, paid for major renovations, and financed the organization’s way out of debt. Yeah, so screw you man! Leave our arts alone, you selfish gazillionaire!
As someone intimate with the details of Nine One One I would like to add it may have been a financially inappropriate decision for the board to sign a lease for the current space given past financial challenges. It is also important to acknowledge Genni Reilly and Phil Fugi, both of whom helped broker an incredibly fair lease at the time. Without Vulcan the doors may have closed and, now, the time has come to thank them for their in-kind and cash equivalent donations and look to a dynamic new model for the future.
Carole Fuller
According to 911 director Steven Vroom, the lease that 911 held with Vulcan was highly unfavorable for 911: a triple-net lease that kept the nonprofit in charge of maintenance and other costs on the building, in addition to making rent payments. What Carole Fuller, 911 board president, notes above echoes what Vroom said: that 911 made predictions that were more optimistic than realistic when they signed the lease. Vroom also explained that Vulcan was a patient landlord, allowing 911 to owe several months’ back rent without hassle.
But over a span of several years, Vulcanland has turned out to be quite hostile territory for small arts nonprofits, while South Lake Union continues to tout itself as a balanced neighborhood full of creative energy. If the arts were a genuine priority for Vulcan, one would think the company might have attempted to address the problem in a comprehensive way before all the independent arts nonprofits were gone.
P.S. Fuller was out of town when I was conducting interviews, so appointed Kurt Kiefer to speak on behalf of the board. I didn’t want anyone to wonder why she wasn’t quoted in the story.
it’s all about money, millions of dollars will trump the value of an arts space every time, Allen made a silly science fiction museum–and a neighborhood that is basically Microsoft with a pea patch. he doesn’t value intelligent and challenging art… It wouldn’t be fiscal suicide to provide a space for a decent org. the problem is that Seattle is desperate to seem world class but has too many rich people that have a serious case of the triple B’s (big, bland, blue chip) Seattle’s cultural face is being made up for tourism and a utopian living destination. to microsoftbucks small orgs are irrelevant and fall through the cracks.
Just to add – having recently worked and socialized daily at 911 for about 1.5 years – South Lake Union is a depressing failure of a neighborhood revitalization – Vulcan’s new buildings are boring, shoddily built, and often ugly – the hundreds of millions poured into development and planning there have yet to yield even a modest street life – the new streetcar has sold more “SLUT” t-shirts than fares because it goes absolutely nowhere useful, like the monorail of old – the much-vaunted ‘new urbanist’ street-front retail consists of an embarrassing collection of over-specialized boutiques and bad, overpriced food … to top it off 911’s space, built around 5 years ago by a benefactor construction company that proceeded to put the org in long-term debt due to its own cost overruns, is in a totally remote wilderness of a block somewhere between the mammoth new UW medical research center and the faceless pharmaceutical behemoths of Westlake Ave – when large groups of people (very) occasionally converge on the Center, magnetized by the opening of an artist like Gary Hill or Greg Lundgren or the vast hordes of Dorkbot.org do-it-yourselfers (or the well attended party in February 08 to release the “Seattle Women in Film” DVD, organized by yours truly), they are forced to congregate in an awkward garage-like layout of rooms, surrounded by the ominous silent dread of the South Lake Union night, rarely returning to enjoy the low-priced, well-taught, perennially under-subscribed workshops that provide the Center a major — if meager — chunk of its income. In sum: the tired trope of big rich developer driving out scrappy beloved arts org from gentrifying neighborhood is totally disingenuous in this case — in actual fact the story is more one of a weirdly immortal arts organization that has lived on despite being stuck in South Lake Union, which is, was, and always will be a shitty place to be, Vulcan or no, until the city gets its shit together to fix the Mercer Corridor and the Denny traffic situation, thereby allowing any kind of pedestrian traffic or otherwise to navigate through its disheartening streetscape to find any of this so-called vibrant emerging neighborhood BS, and meanwhile 911 is probably vastly better served by hooking up with a like-minded organization like Jack Straw, in a location close to sympathetic media centers like DX Arts and the Henry Art Gallery, and downsizing its criminally under-utilized community space to offer satellite outreach in an increasingly localized, do-it-yourself digital media galaxy, the loss of a wildly original (but poorly attended) art gallery space in Seattle notwithstanding. In other words, fuck Paul Allen – but quit fucking whining and find a better angle, please.