Building an Artist Community in Washington Heights and Inwood

by Peter Ferko, President, Artists Unite, Inc.

Change as the Status Quo

43 million people move in America in a year, according to a study conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2000¹. A small percentage of those who move come from abroad. Probably an even smaller group move abroad. We live in a mobile society. I personally have lived in Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, California, Florida, and now New York. My wife, while a native New Yorker from the Upper West Side, has lived in California and Russia before moving back to New York City to live in the “Upper Upper West Side” of Washington Heights.

Washington Heights and Inwood have been home to immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Germany, the Dominican Republic; and one could now say, as in the case of my wife, from Lower Manhattan. Washington Heights has a diverse population, including 74 percent hispanic; half of which are of Dominican background. 50% of Washington Heights’ population has moved from abroad, which sounds (and is) high until you consider that almost 40% of New York City’s population has moved from abroad.²

Our mobility makes it challenging to define what constitutes “community”—is it a physical area, an economic demographic, an ethnic unity, a set of personal friendships, or something else? And does community by necessity change over time with all our mobility, or is there something that can be sustained? I leave it to sociologists to determine the answers to these questions and I look forward to hearing what they have to say. Today, though, I am here to discuss the idea of an “artist community.”

Artist Community

In my moving and travels, I have had the good fortune of meeting and knowing artists from all over the world. I notice certain qualities that artists have wherever they are from: they are creative, they often challenge norms, many have quirky personalities, they often make a living through a haphazard collection of jobs or have second careers that have nothing to do with their art, they are unusually passionate about something that informs their art and often their lives in general, they find a way to keep doing their art in spite of the challenges of life. And they all have challenges: not enough time to work, nowhere to show their work, not enough money to live on while they concentrate on their art, no audience, not enough sales of artwork or performances, no one to talk to about their work. A recent survey by Association of Hispanic Artists points out artists in Washington Heights and Inwood are no different in this regard.³ The September 2004 issue of Art Forum states “With the globalization of the art world, national differences among artists have grown increasingly marginal.”⁴ Our similarities as artists provide a context for our interaction wherever we find ourselves.

Artists Unite, Inc. is attempting to help create an artist community in Washington Heights and Inwood. What does this mean? In my estimation and therefore my definition, an “artist community” would address the issues of artists and work to resolve them. I believe that fostering an artist community would entail getting artists to know each other, generating excitement about their work, and enabling artists to begin to make more art among themselves. These interactions of artists themselves—as individuals creating events, bookstores hosting readings, groups of artists creating exhibitions, etc.—have been the basis of artist communities in Greenwich Village, SoHo, and Williamsburg. A critical mass of artistic activity in those areas turned them into significant art centers with a base of local artists. In contrast Chelsea, where wealthy gallery owners and the occasional museum (e.g. Dia Center) moved in, there are featured internationally known artists and there is no real community. Lincoln Center follows the same model for the performing arts. So I would say the arts organizations here in Washington Heights and Inwood are on the right track for helping local artists.

Any artist community in New York City has the advantage of proximity to the world’s largest population of art appreciators. These people—artists, collectors, curators, audiences, and other interested members of the public—can become, in a way, part of the community by supporting it. For example, lower Manhattanites took part in the opening for Artists Unite’s exhibition Now:Here:This and in the Uptown Arts Stroll.

An artist community is a kind of parallel universe to the community at large. Artists often study or otherwise become familiar with the work of other artists and are naturally curious about topics of culture, history, current affairs, and interesting stories. Consequently, their work becomes an amalgamation of their studies, their personal history, and their aesthetic as expressed through the palette of their current location. A Dominican musician may become fascinated with hip-hop in New York; a white New York photographer may become enthralled with the use of milagro fetishes in Mexico; a European classical composer in Inwood may dabble in merengue rhythms; a second-generation Ecuadorean painter may choose as a subject Manhattan’s bridges. So the numerous artists living in upper Manhattan may be alike or not alike; they may work in different media or different genres; they may even speak different languages. What makes an artist community a community is the interaction of its members. Once that interaction begins, there is a natural tendency to support each other’s work, whether by simply inquiring about it, or attending shows, or even deciding to collaborate on a project. And in our mobile society, the relationships built through these interactions may even last if the artists move.

New York has seen several artist communities emerge in the past 40 years. I believe Upper Manhattan could become the next one. It is ironic that while many artists have lived here for years, it is the fact that New Yorkers in general now regard Northern Manhattan as a livable part of the city that may allow its artist community to flourish. So as Washington Heights and Inwood become more popular parts of the city, downtown artists and audience may find themselves examining the art that comes from our current mixing of long-term residents and newcomers. What will be interesting, in my opinion, is the degree to which all artists in the community participate in what is happening so that the Washington Heights and Inwood arts community can become as artistically rich as possible.

Artists Unite, Inc.

When I moved to Washington Heights in January 2002 to move into my new wife’s apartment, I stumbled upon an organization just beginning to form. It was called Artists Unite, and was the work of three local artists (including Rosa Naparstek, current Board member) with the idea of getting artists together in the community in order to make more arts happen up here. The goal was to improve the quality of life for local artists and local residents by providing opportunities for artists to work here rather than taking their talents downtown.

I became part of the Steering Committee for Artists Unite. The committee included a variety of artists and local community members and worked for six months developing a structure for the organization and a plan for working as an umbrella of collaborations between artists and between Artists Unite and other arts organizations. When we incorporated last year, I became President of the Board of Directors.

Artists Unite’s mission is to foster the arts community in Washington Heights and Inwood. The question foremost on my mind as I have worked on further developing Artists Unite from a fledgling idea into a useful organization has been, “Is there an arts community in Washington Heights and Inwood?” Our organization has had a difficult time identifying such a community as I am defining it. There do appear to be, however, many artists who have an interest in sharing in such a community. Evidence of this fact is in the attendance at Artists Unite’s meetings, which regularly draw more than 100 artists in various genres including visual and performing arts and literature.

Artists Unite has faced several challenges in its efforts. A major one is lack of funding, which makes all our efforts voluntary. Finding volunteers in a high pressure environment like New York City is difficult. A second challenge is getting broad participation. We have used creative methods and hard work to produce a number of events and to collaborate on a handful more. Participation has been good, but sadly, the majority of artists in the neighborhood do not participate as either participants or audience. The Uptown Arts Stroll was a project with good participation from the community businesses and about 50 artists, but I believe we need to do better at including more artists in projects in general.

The challenge I presented to Artists Unite was then, what can we do to bring more artists into all aspects of what we do in our organization. We are pursuing ideas in several areas. The first idea is in the area of visual arts. The project is called Virtual:Comunidad. The second is with artist-run events. The third is collaborations, i.e., groups of artists working together.

The Model of Virtual:Comunidad

The background of the project is in Washington, D.C. In 1999, I began participating in a project with several Washington, D.C. artists. The project, called 5 Things, was the brainchild of James Huckenpahler and provided participants an opportunity to list on a web site the five things that most influenced our creative practice that week. The “things” could be anything from a favorite artist to something we read in the news. The amazing thing about the project was that other artists were interested in reading it. And art viewers and collectors were interested in reading it. So much so that the group of five or six artists who ultimately wrote 5 Things achieved notoriety in the D.C. art community and participated in local charity events and panel discussions. The project lasted for three years before losing steam.

I decided to apply the 5 Things idea to Artists Unite. I had two objectives. On the one hand, I wanted local artists to think enough of the project to want to participate. On the other, I wanted to begin to build a name for Artists Unite in the greater art world. The solution I arrived at, whose first installment was called Now:Here:This and was followed by Virtual:Comunidad, was to create an on-line exhibition that is ongoing and to open participation up to artists everywhere. The three-month long Now:Here:This project included thirty artists from six countries and from several cities across the U.S. Ten of these artists were from Washington Heights and Inwood. The project has attracted the attention of several arts professionals in New York City as well as artists in other countries and it received a grant from the Puffin Foundation. The launch of this project brought 200 additional visitors to Artists Unite’s web site each week.

The beauty of this project from a community-building standpoint is that in addition to being a project with high quality art, it is also ongoing, frequent, and open. These qualities invite artists to have a look and then decide to participate. Through word of mouth, the “virtual community or comunidad virtual” of Virtual:Comunidad grows, always inviting new artists in this physical community to get to know each other’s work, to enter into artistic dialog, and to ultimately feel a part of a meaningful international art community based right here in Washington Heights and Inwood. There are artists living elsewhere in New York, Washington D.C., France and elsewhere who now know of Washington Heights and Inwood artists through this virtual space. As your and my organizations begin to have more of a dialog, I look forward to more of our Washington Heights and Inwood artists joining this project and that “meeting” each other in this way, they will move into other less virtual collaborations. This exhibition can be viewed at www.artistsunite-ny.org.

The Model of Hot Nights, Cool Sounds: Artist-Run Events

Artists Unite’s summer concert series was in its third year this year. We decided to try to increase participation by local artists by soliciting a committee of musicians to run the series. A group of four musicians came forward, joining two Artists Unite Board members to run the entire program. We look forward to conducting more activities this way, ultimately letting previous projects serve as templates for new projects that artists want to create; and letting artists rely on other artists for advice and to share experiences.

Collaborations

Artists Unite has participated in the first two occasions of the Uptown Arts Stroll as a collaborator with Community Board 12, the Manhattan Times, and numerous other organizations. We participated on the advisory committee in the artist survey conducted this year by the Association of Hispanic Artists. And we have worked with other local arts organizations to publicize projects and to leverage resources. We believe that joining together with other organizations not only gets the artists in those organizations to start to know each other, but helps the organizations share audiences. Our goal is to ultimately begin to see our community’s organizations, such as Artists Unite, have enough “brand” value that when a project includes our name, the audience, press, and other arts professionals will register the project as one that is of high caliber. Collaboration allows individual groups to continue to fill the niche the organization intended, while getting some of the benefits of scale that usually only large organizations get.

Conclusion

An artist community is a group or groups of artists who know each other, work together, show work to each other, promote an art scene of consistent quality, and gain from these experiences. Our way of viewing the world as artists provides a context for creating such a community. We have the makings of such a community here in Washington Heights and Inwood. I look forward to the artistic excitement and challenge of working with other artists here. I look forward to the cross-fertilization and enrichment that will come from such interaction.

When I created the online exhibitions Now:Here:This and Virtual:Comunidad, I thought of them in terms of creating an “art spark”—a concentration of energy focused on Artists Unite as one hub in this fledgling artist community. I am excited to see in this Symposium, more sparks of energy around the idea of our artist community.

I do not know how sociologists will define “community” in these times, but it is my proposition that artists, through their study and work, transcend the boundaries of a physical community. Our physical communities continually change in our contemporary mobile world. I hope that through a set of activities described here, that the artists who currently find themselves in this physical community, through choice or family history, begin to interact as an artist community. And that when they move on, or others move in, the personal connections that have formed help them sustain a comunidad virtual that holds them together. Through our physical and virtual artist community, Washington Heights and Inwood’s art scene can be a place known for its artists and meaningful art projects.

And finally I hope many of you will see value in uniting and will volunteer to help us at Artists Unite!

References

¹ Current Population Reports by Jason Schachter; PPL-144, Geographical Mobility:March 1999 to March 2000, U.S. Census Bureau

² U.S. Census Bureau, 2000

³“A Community Arts & Cultural Assessment of Washington Heights and Inwood” A study, conducted by Association of Hispanic Artists and sponsored by the Audubon Partnership, published in April of 2004

⁴ “American Self-Consciousness in Politics and Art,” Arthur C. Danto, Art Forum, September 2004, p.206