Dance teacher Catherine Willis is organizing the dance offerings at this weekend's grand opening celebration. (Chip Scheuer)
Catherine Willis’ eyes light up when she talks about the dance performances she has planned for the June 1 grand opening of the Tannery Arts Center’s Digital Media and Creative Arts Center on River Street.
“We’ll have Haitian dance, Mexican folkloric dance, Bollywood dance, contemporary, even tango,” says Willis, the co-founder of the nonprofit Tannery World Dance and Cultural Center and a longtime dance teacher who joined the Tannery in February.
Dancers won’t be the only artists on display at the two-day celebration, says Rachel Goodman, the Tannery’s new executive director. Twenty-six visual artists will open their studios, which are part of the new center, to the public, discussing their work, demonstrating their techniques and even helping kids complete a scavenger hunt that will end in the creation of a massive mosaic.
And, of course, there will be a giant party starting on First Friday and continuing Saturday, with live music by bands including the Juncos, Tether Horse and the Santa Cruz Youth Symphony Quartet, plus libations and a performing arts showcase.
“The feeling of excitement is palpable,” Goodman says. For good reason: The opening is a milestone for the Tannery, the realization of “Phase 2” of its vision to create a campus where artists can live and work and share their work with the public. (Phase 1, which focused on building and renting 100 on-site affordable housing units for artists and their families, was completed in 2009.)
But there’s still much to be done. The Tannery is still searching for a long-term tenant to anchor the Digital Media and Creative Arts Center. The Tannery fundraising team tasked with raising $5 million for a 200-seat theater and performance space—also known as “Phase 3”—still has multiple millions to go. And Tannery artists, board members and staff must convince the Santa Cruz arts community that they’re a force to be reckoned with.
Goodman’s not worried.
“I’m feeling pretty positive,” she says.
Arts in the Right Space
It wasn’t so long ago that the old Salz Tannery site was a blighted trouble magnet.
“People were stripping copper [off the building] and selling it to be melted down,” says Kirby Scudder, the Tannery’s first resident and a multimedia artist who moved onto the property in early 2007. “There’s a lot of copper on 8.3 acres of property.”
The transient and homeless populations that lived by the San Lorenzo River, which runs alongside the Tannery, had been stripping copper, squatting and posing what the city of Santa Cruz saw as security threats to the property since it ceased tannery operations in fall 2001.{pagebreak}
Ceil Cirillo, then head of the city’s redevelopment agency, is credited with having the initial vision for the Tannery, and for spearheading the environmental remediation and rezoning necessary to transform the property into a viable arts complex. She asked Scudder if he would consider living on-site in the house where Jacob Kron, the original owner of the tannery in the late 19th century, had lived with his family.
“I said, ‘Sure, when the project’s done!’” Scudder recalls. Initially, he wasn’t too keen on playing security guard, but Cirillo convinced him by allowing him to invite fellow artists to occupy the Kron house and to set up gallery space on the property.
“Kirby and his cadre of friends became the Tannery’s first caretakers,” says Cirillo, who’s now retired but is an active member of the Tannery’s Board of Directors. Their residence and gallery were the first small steps toward Cirillo’s larger vision for the Tannery, which was inspired by her pre-Santa Cruz days in Southern California.
“There were a lot of artist live-work developments,” says Cirillo of 1980s Los Angeles and its surrounding cities. “People were converting old industrial buildings into lofts for artists to live and work in. When I came to Santa Cruz [in 1990], after the Loma Prieta earthquake, I was looking for opportunities for creative reuse [of vacant buildings].”
She and other city officials looked at the Rio Theater on Soquel Avenue and the Del Mar Theatre on Pacific Avenue as possibilities for a performance space; they didn’t pan out. Other efforts to redevelop the city, which was in sorry shape after the devastating 1989 quake, put artists in a pinch.
The development of Gateway Plaza in the mid-1990s led to the displacement of artists with studio space in a building acquired and leveled by the city to widen River Street. Some flocked to the former Wilson Plumbing building, but were again displaced when that property was cited for remediation.
“I realized that we had a number of artists here who didn’t have affordable working studios or housing,” Cirillo says.
When the Tannery, then known as the Salz Tannery, closed just after 9/11, a friend suggested to Cirillo that the city could use the property for residential lofts, especially for artists.
“I thought of it in larger terms,” Cirillo says. She connected in late 2001 with ArtSpace, a Minneapolis-based group that manages and designs live-work spaces for artists. She proposed an ArtSpace-led feasibility study of the property to the City Council and got the go-ahead.
“We worked with [ArtSpace] to do a number of focus groups in February 2002,” Cirillo says. “We included every discipline—elected officials, philanthropists, visual artists, performing artists—and asked them to give us feedback about whether there would be support for an arts campus of some sort.”
The response? An overwhelming “yes.”
Cirillo got the ball rolling. The city acquired the property in mid-2002, hired a San Francisco architect, began the multi-year Superfund site clean-up in 2003 and secured $6.7 million in federal funding, along with local and state redevelopment money, along the way.
Just over five years later, in November 2008, the Tannery began the first-come, first-serve application process for 100 artist loft rentals. Again, the response was effusive.
“Everyone lined up at 6 in the morning on application day,” Scudder says. “We probably had 150 people out there.” The units were all spoken for within hours.{pagebreak}
Creative Commons
Ann Hazels takes a break from glazing a sculpture in her Tannery studio to share her experience working alongside other artists in the new DMCAC.
“I’m heavily influenced by my surroundings,” says Hazels, who has also been employed by the Tannery as a development and fundraising coordinator since late 2009. “It’s inspiring to see what other people are doing.”
She mentions a couple, Luis Garza and Devi Pride, who are sharing a studio space and tailoring it to meet both of their artistic needs.
“She’s a photographer, and he teaches dance, so they’re putting in a sprung floor in the studio so he can teach there,” Hazels says. To her, Garza and Pride’s multi-use space is a reflection of the Tannery’s diverse, multi-disciplinary community, as well as its capacity for community involvement—something Santa Cruz has shown it likes by its warm reception of First Fridays and the highly interactive new format at the Museum of Art and History.
The digital media part of the new Tannery also has a bright future. Goodman, who worked as the district director and press secretary for Assemblymember Bill Monning before joining the Tannery staff, is passionate about digital media. In addition to her years of broadcast work for KUSP’s Talk of the Bay, and after graduating from Santa Cruz in 1987, she worked at Appalshop, a multi-disciplinary arts and education center in eastern Kentucky with a strong focus on radio and video production.
“That experience made me think that [the Tannery] could eventually be like that,” Goodman says. “I would love to be part of the blossoming of digital media arts in Santa Cruz.”
She adds that there’s a need for high-end workshops in digital media, for example for students coming out of Cabrillo College with recording arts degrees. Scudder, himself a digital artist, agrees.
“A lot of us are hoping to see world-class digital media in that space,” Scudder says. “There’s a huge talent pool in Santa Cruz, but not enough educational centers. Everybody I’ve talked to here is interested in seeing an educational and production facility for digital media.”
So why doesn’t the center have a tenant yet?
Goodman says the city, which now officially owns the property since California dissolved its redevelopment agencies, is looking for a long-term tenant. That narrows the possibilities a bit.
“They’re not interested in finding someone who’s too experimental, otherwise they’ll be out of there within two months,” Goodman says. Tannery Board Treasurer George Newell says the Tannery is in conversation with several potential tenants about occupying the digital media space, but no contracts have been signed yet.
Cabrillo College and UC–Santa Cruz both have representatives on the Tannery’s board, but Warren Sack, the chair of UCSC’s Digital Arts and New Media program, had not heard about the Tannery’s plans for a digital media center.
“We know nothing about it,” Sack said via email. Given the central role education is to play in the center as envisioned, this lack of awareness seems strange.
But Sack is heartened by the project’s ambitions, and hopes to be a part of the center when it is more established.
“It would be lovely to see a working relationship develop between TAC and UCSC,” Sack says.
For now, Goodman, Scudder, Willis, Hazels and the many Tannery artists are banking on positive word of mouth from this weekend’s open studios event, and on the strong sense of community they hope to build with a diverse cross-section of the city at large.
“We want to cultivate an environment where people feel like dance is accessible to them,” Willis says of her classes. She’s raising funds at the event for Santa Cruz Outreach Program and Enrichment (SCOPE), a program created to provide dance lessons to low-income youth free of charge.
“I was a scholarship student,” Willis says. “For me, creating a space where all kids can come and be exposed to amazing artists is living the dream.”
Goodman and her board have their work cut out for them before Phase 3 is complete and a public performance space on Tannery property is built. But, with 60 percent of the funds raised, she’s keeping the faith.
“You look at a blank courtyard and you say, ‘I know there’s going to be art sculptures out there someday, and I’m excited about that, even though they’re not there yet,’” Goodman says, gazing outside her office window at an empty concrete space. “It takes a certain amount of imagination, which everyone here has.”
DIGITAL MEDIA AND CREATIVE ARTS CENTER GRAND OPENING
Friday, June 1, 5pm–midnight
Saturday, June 2, noon–5pm
Tannery Arts Center
Free
