FORWARD>Fast Forward>The Word of God, Rewritten

The Word of God, Rewritten

By Beth Schwartzapfel
May 29, 2008

On the upcoming festival of Shavuot, we commemorate the day when Moses carried the Torah — with its 613 rules, injunctions and guidelines on how to live a Jewish life — down from Mount Sinai. Some of its commandments, like “Do not murder” and “Love the stranger,” ring as true today as they did in the Sinai desert. Others, like “Destroy the seed of Amalek” and “Do not eat the flesh of an ox that was condemned to be stoned,” require a little creativity to remain applicable to the lives of 21st-century Jews.

So, two San Francisco-based artists have set up a Web site that allows Jews everywhere to apply their own brand of creativity and humor to the task. (RE)velation (http://revelation.xoxco.com) users “remix” the commandments, using colloquial English and a modern sensibility to reinterpret the lessons of the mitzvot. Thus, “Do not carry tales” becomes “Gossip magazines are not your friend,” and, in a rather unorthodox take, “Do not leave a beast that has fallen down beneath its burden, unaided” becomes “Mick Jagger just wants you to make love to him.” It’s sort of like a Talmud wiki.

“There’s nothing new about what we’re doing,” (RE)velation co-creator Ben Brown said. “There is a long tradition of scholarly interpretation and reinterpretation of the text. This is just a hyper-modern take on that process.” The Web site is only the first step in what ultimately will be a multimedia art installation that will be unveiled on Shavuot at the San Francisco-based DAWN festival.

DAWN was launched in 2005 as a new take on the Shavuot tradition of all-night Torah study: From late at night until the wee hours of morning, attendees partake in Jewish-themed musical performances, art installations, literary salons and religious discussions. This year, DAWN will mark the grand opening of San Francisco’s new Contemporary Jewish Museum, and (RE)velation will be one of the cornerstones of the event. Images of Mount Sinai will be projected onto a wall, and the text of the original 613 commandments, along with hundreds of their “remixed” counterparts, will descend from above. The voices of (RE)velation participants reading their commandments aloud will play from on high. A kiosk will allow visitors to offer their own reinterpretations, and their contributions will be integrated into the installation in real time. With lights and sound, the idea is that participants can “heavily re-imagine the experience of being at the foot of Mount Sinai while the commandments descend from above,” Brown said.

Skeptics might allege that when the God of Exodus said, “Do not muzzle a beast, while it is working in produce which it can eat and enjoy,” he most certainly did not mean “Go ahead — text during meetings. Really.” But some might say that’s exactly what he meant.

“You gotta be in conversation with the tradition,” co-creator Ari Kelman said. Besides, “I would hope God has a sense of humor.”

Mr. Beller's Neighborhood>Straggling at the Guggenheim

Straggling at the Guggenheim

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 3, 2007

It’s a freezing Friday night at the Guggenheim, 8:00, and technically the museum closed 15 minutes ago. Two gallery guides, as their bright red tags indicate they’re called, are following Cate and I down the spiral that swoops around the building’s atrium like some giant half-stretched slinky. They are, at times during our forced march, some twenty or thirty feet behind us, and at other times they’re practically stepping on our heels. They’re sweepers, having started at the top of the loop, in the room with all the crucifixions, and corralled the remaining museum-goers toward the exit via the long, curving walk which ends at the door to the frigid pavement on Fifth Avenue.

Cate and I take a minute to admire a portrait of a young girl, her dark hair cut in a straight line across her chin—her bright brown eyes seem as if she’s looking right at you!—before resuming the walk. Cate and I don’t always agree when it comes to fine art, so many of our dalliances involve a painting that she likes and I don’t, or vice versa, disassembling what elements strike us for liking or not liking. When we stop to agree that neither of us likes a stuffy still life with food, the gallery guides catch up with us. “We’re still closed,” they say, but in a nice way. Footsteps and voices echo in the atrium.

The one on the right is named Vanessa Rubio, and it’s only her second week on the job. She arrived at the Guggenheim after working for several years at the Americas Society Art Gallery on Park Avenue and 68th Street, a job she described as much less busy, and “on Park Avenue, so you get those kind of people.” Rubio has the skin tone of white frosting dusted with cinnamon, or coffee with lots of cream, and her long, dark, curly hair is pulled back into a neat bun. She wears trendy purple titanium glasses. She is an artist—mostly a painter, but she does some cartooning, too—who chose this new job because it allows her more time to take classes in the evenings at the School of Visual Art. At 23, she recently graduated from NYU, where she majored in art and art history.

When I met Rubio, upstairs, Cate was admiring a crucifixion by Jusepe de Ribera, who lived in the Kingdom of Naples, then part of the Spanish empire, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The painting features a mostly-naked Jesus, nailed to a cross, with rivulets of blood, and a pained expression.

As a rule, I hate crucifixion paintings, and this was no exception. In my notebook, I noted that the paintings in this room are populated primarily by “draped and moaning people.” In fact, the one painting in this room that moved me is the one that seemed totally unrelated to the others, a tiny whimsical Goya canvas called “The Drunk Mason,” which depicts two men smirking at each other over the head of their friend, presumably the eponymous mason, who is too drunk to walk and who they are carrying between them, his stockings slouched down to his ankles. The sky, bright blue in the top left corner, melts to a white haze above their heads in the early morning.

“Look how sexual it is,” Cate said, indicating the Ribera, and I grunted uninterestedly. It didn’t look sexual to me, only boring. “There are no lines in his torso at all. He obviously loved the male form.” Rubio nodded, agreeing with Cate. “It’s definitely not boring,” she said. She said she has learned a lot from being around the masters here. She paints mostly people, herself, using acrylics to render paintings from photographs of herself and her friends, but her favorite in this room is a giant abstract charcoal drawing. “It’s going in all directions. I feel there’s a thousand stories in there,” she said. She was wearing a black sweater over a black shirt, with long rows of tiny white buttons on the sleeves. All of her paintings, so far, are untitled. “I’ve never named any of them because I don’t feel like they’re official enough to name,” she said. “I mostly just hang them in my house or in my family’s house. I’m not like, ‘this is “the Vase.” ’”

When Cate and I first arrived at the museum, at 7:20, a security guard in a blue shirt and tie with graying hair told us we could not come in, since the ticket window had closed at 7:15. We would simply have to come back another time. However, the ticket seller said that tickets were in fact available until 7:30 and grudgingly allowed us to pay $5 for the both of us. It was “pay what you wish” night, and after all, we only had 15 minutes before closing.

Then the woman behind us on the ticket line asked if she could get in free, and as Cate and I were rushing upstairs we heard the ticket seller ask whether she had any pocket change to contribute. Clearly he’d been told that this is “pay what you wish,” not “pay nothing at all” night, and everyone was expected to pay something. Immediately I wished I had given him a couple of quarters instead of a precious 5 dollar bill. “Oh,” said the blue shirt and tie man, with raised eyebrows, as we thrust our tickets toward him. “You got in.” I couldn’t tell if he was irritated or simply making an observation.

Now the same man came upstairs to tell Vanessa Rubio that she should start herding the stragglers downstairs. “Oh,” he said, when he saw me. “Nice to see you again.” Rubio had just started telling me how Debbie Harry had come in that very afternoon, dressed all in ski boots and swishy pants like she’d been on her way to the slopes. “I tried not to look too much,” she said. And then I said, “I know you have to go,” which was going to be followed by “but,” and another question, when Rubio looked at me. “So do you,” she said, but in a nice way, and we commenced our forced march down the sloping hall and into the cold night.

FORWARD>Yiddish Special Section>Exhibit Marks Collection’s Debut

Exhibit Marks Collection’s Debut

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 2, 2007

Among the Jewish immigrants who arrived in America at the turn of the past century, most brought little in the way of material riches. Nonetheless, Cantor David Tillman said, “they brought with them tremendous culture.”

Sitting in the tiny Temple Judea Museum, located in suburban Philadelphia’s Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel, Tillman motioned to the Yiddish playbills, theater posters, sheet music and LP sleeves that were on display in the glass cases. The millions of immigrants who crowded into New York City’s Lower East Side 100 years ago “had no money, so they couldn’t go to Carnegie Hall,” Tillman continued. “And even if they could have gone, they wouldn’t have understood any of it. Yiddish theater was their way of acculturation.”

This musical and theatrical heritage is on display through March 25 in the museum’s current exhibit Molly Picon, Fridl Braur and a Mishpocha of Yiddish Music, which marks the debut of the Eugene and Marie Buxton Collection of Jewish Music and the Performing Arts.

“Music is central to the Bible,” the museum’s director and curator, Rita Rosen Poley, told the Forward. “Music is central to who we are as Jews. I don’t want [Yiddish music] to be an artifact. I want people to come in here and use it.”

So, when Tillman and his friend and colleague Cantor Jack Kessler, music director for the band Klingon Klezmer, came in to browse the collection, Poley lovingly opened one of the cases and handed them a pile of handwritten sheet music by Israeli composer Gabriel Grad. The two men pored over the yellowing pile of inked and red pencil-scrawled paper, occasionally bursting into a niggun and banging the table. “Look at this,” Tillman said. “It’s a duet, for piano and tenor, and —” he squinted at the Yiddish, “—psanteran. Piano.”

The museum occupies some 400 mauve-carpeted square feet in the synagogue’s grand, airy lobby. Its offerings began as two private collections in the 1940s and ’50s: Rabbi Meyer Lasker of nearby Temple Judea and Rabbi Bertram Korn of Keneseth Israel were avid collectors of Jewish ceremonial items and artwork. After World War II, they traveled to Europe to rescue the remaining Jewish artifacts. When Temple Judea closed in 1984, the two collections were merged and, with a $150,000 endowment, the Temple Judea Museum was founded. Its collection now includes some 1,500 objects, two of which are the second-oldest American ketubah, dating from the 1700s, and a British circumcision set from the 1800s. Poley, a spunky redheaded grandmother and veteran art administrator, is the museum’s second professional director and its sole employee.

Two years ago, Marie Buxton, a Kneseth Israel congregant, donated $10,000 to begin a special collection for the museum, focusing on music and the performing arts. Poley used the gift to make the collection’s first acquisition — on eBay. At the time, she had never heard of Gabriel Grad, a Lithuanian-born musician and composer who founded a conservatory in Tel Aviv in 1925. But when she saw a collection of his papers available on eBay for $90, she thought she’d take a chance. The items that arrived were not just the handwritten sheet music and notes, but also his passport and those of his wife and son, insurance documents and a 1927 Certificate of Naturalization from the Government of Palestine. The collection was off to a promising start, and Poley still had more than $9,900 on hand.

From there, Poley went on to acquire a similar collection of papers and handwritten notes from Yiddish composer Michl Gilbert (who wrote the Yiddish words to “I Have a Little Dreidel”), original playbills from three stage productions starring legendary Yiddish actress Molly Picon (“A Majority of One,” “Milk and Honey” and “How To Be a Jewish Mother”), photographs, vinyl records, sheet music, books, broadsides, and programs and announcements for events in early Palestine (two programs announce the opening of Tel Aviv’s Habima Theater, in 1917). Many of the items were acquired on eBay for just $4 or $5. One songsheet, which features an art-nouveau-style drawing of a plump woman, is for the Yiddish song “Kolumbus, Ich Hob Tsav Dir Gor Nit,” or, “Columbus, You Have Done Me No Good.” An accompanying sign explains that the song was probably inspired by Gershon Rosenzweig’s 1894 novel, “Talmud Yankee” — “one of many satiric literary expressions of discontent with life in America… A Klug Tzu Columbus, [or] ‘A curse upon Columbus,’ was another phrase frequently used by Yiddish speaking Jewish immigrants.”

About half the items in the current exhibition were purchased with Buxton’s original gift; Poley estimates that the Buxton collection now contains almost 300 items. Additional items, such as shofars, handmade Purim groggers and other decorative objects, were selected from the museum’s existing collection. And still others were donated by congregants. “I turn nothing down,” Poley said of the private donations, “because I don’t know how they’ll turn out or what they’ll be.”

One of the museum’s most enthusiastic supporters is a congregant who works as an antiques dealer (he is the reason that the museum owns the ketubah; he heard about it through the antiques grapevine, flew down to Pittsburgh to buy it, brought it home and donated it to the museum). Poley recalls one day when the dealer’s wife came in with a huge box of books. “She said, ‘Here, Rita, have this. My husband found it — he doesn’t even know where it came from’!” Inside the box, Poley discovered handwritten music by Aaron Friedmann, high music director of Berlin’s Royal Academy of Art. Friedmann served as chief cantor of Berlin’s Old Synagogue from 1882 until 1923.

Another congregant saw an invitation to the current exhibit and called the museum. “I got your invitation — you want some records?” he asked Poley. On display from his collection are the 1961 album “Connie Francis Sings Jewish Favorites” (an accompanying sign explains that Francis learned Yiddish when she got her start as a young performer at Grossinger’s, a Catskills resort) and an album by 1940s Yiddish radio personality Shaindele.

Chana Mlotek, music archivist of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, said a collection like the one on display at the Temple Judea Museum is very important. “Yiddish cultural life in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s is a culture of our American heritage, and [an exhibition like this] is a symbol of that culture,” she told the Forward. Physical representations of Yiddish music and theater, she said, are like “a window to our cultural treasures.”

The only problem with the museum is that it may be too small to showcase all the collection’s items. Between her knack for finding hidden treasures, and congregants’ donations of their own prized possessions, Poley said, “I could have filled a space three times the size of this place.”

FORWARD>Arts & Culture>Warhol's Tribe

Warhol's Tribe

Beth Schwartzapfel
February 23, 2007

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Andy Warhol — as good a time as any to reminisce, in these pages, about the famed artist’s place in Jewish history. Although Warhol is best known for his portraits of such pop icons as Elvis Presley and Jackie Kennedy, in 1980 he also completed a set of 10 portraits of Jewish icons, commissioned by art dealer and gallery owner Ronald Feldman. By the time they collaborated on the series, Feldman and Warhol had been friends for almost 10 years. The two men met in the early 1970s, when Feldman and his wife opened Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in the Stable Gallery building on East 74th Street in Manhattan, where Warhol had first showed his famous Campbell’s Soup Can paintings. Even after Feldman’s gallery relocated to SoHo, Warhol would stop by every Saturday with his dachshund, Archie, to chat and ask for ideas.

Later in the 1970s, Feldman noticed that Warhol had been straying from his usual pattern of making 10 identical prints of the same image —10 Marilyns, 10 flowers, 10 Maos — and that he had been taking an almost cubist approach to his subject matter. Warhol’s Muhammad Ali series, for instance, which he had completed in 1978, consisted of four different prints, each of which showed a different view of Ali’s head or hand. “So that all of a sudden, he was making a fractured image of somebody. Instead of the one image in different colors but the same image, each element was a separate unit,” Feldman told the Forward.

When an Israeli art dealer called Feldman to ask whether Andy might paint 10 Golda Meirs, it was Feldman’s “aha” moment. “Ten Goldas just seemed so old as an idea,” after the fractured canvasses, Feldman said. “You can do a historic 10 — 10 different people — and he loved that idea.” Feldman commissioned Warhol to make 200 sets of the 10 silk-screened print folios — later, he commissioned Warhol to do a set of paintings, as well — and the two set to work creating a list of the subjects, whom Warhol referred to simply as his “Jewish geniuses."

They wanted a representative from a mix of eras and professions — actors, writers, politicians and scientists are all included. Karl Marx almost made the cut, until they realized that he had died in 1883, missing the 20th-century mark by almost two decades. They considered Bob Dylan, but he was jettisoned after they decided to include George Gershwin instead; plus, Dylan had become a born-again Christian, and Feldman and Warhol’s research had turned up the fact that Sarah Bernhardt, whom they had already settled on, had converted to Catholicism — “so we already had that,” Feldman said. In addition to Gershwin and Bernhardt, the geniuses are Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Martin Buber, Louis Brandeis, the Marx Brothers, Golda Meir and Sigmund Freud.

In 1980, an exhibit of the work, Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, opened at the Jewish Museum on Manhattan’s Upper East Side — and was promptly trashed by New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer. “To the many afflictions suffered by the Jewish people in the course of their long history, the new Andy Warhol show at the Jewish Museum cannot be said to make a significant addition,” wrote Kramer in a review that ran the day before Yom Kippur. “But what it may do to the reputation of the Jewish Museum is, as they say, something else.”

Carrie Rickey, an art critic reviewing the show for Artforum magazine, was also initially put off by the whole concept of the series, seeing it as “Jewploitation” and quipping that the project’s “only raison d’être was to penetrate a new market: the Synagogue circuit.” But Warhol’s craftsmanship won her over. “Somehow this segregated ethnic segment — as offensive as it does sound — provided Warhol with enough referents to make the work successful,” she wrote. “The paintings of Jews had an unexpected mix of cultural anthropology, portraiture, celebration of celebrity, and study of intelligentsia — all at the same time."

The series, part of the permanent collection of the Jewish Museum, is currently on loan to the Park Avenue Bank as part of the bank’s Meet a Museum exhibition program. It runs through March 2.

FORWARD>Arts and Culture>Rembrandt Revised

Rembrandt Revised
Was the Dutch Master Really a Philo-Semite?

By Beth Schwartzapfel
January 5, 2007

As Jewish devotees of Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn are fond of noting, he lived and worked in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter during the “Golden Age” of the 17th century. He painted dozens of portraits of Jews and had a relationship with at least one prominent Jewish figure — Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel. As conventional wisdom goes, he must have had a deep connection to his Israelite neighbors.

Not so, says a new exhibit at Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum.

Called “The ‘Jewish’ Rembrandt,” the exhibit aims to differentiate “what is myth and what is fact,” according to its curator, Mirjam Alexander. “We don’t think there’s any factual evidence to support this idea that Rembrandt was a special friend to the Jews,” she told the Forward. Part of the Netherlands’ yearlong Rembrandt 400 Festival, in honor of the artist’s quadricentennial birthday, the exhibit runs through February.

“Their take is absolutely right,” said Steven Nadler, author of “Rembrandt’s Jews” (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and professor of philosophy and Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There’s been this myth of Rembrandt as this extraordinarily sympathetic philo-Semite who lived among the Jews because he had this deep feeling of identification with them,” he told the Forward. “In fact, he moved into what was the Jewish neighborhood only because it was also the center for Amsterdam’s art world.”

Indeed, one of the first installations that visitors to the exhibition will encounter is a large, interactive map of the Jewish quarter in the 1600s that shows the proximity of Rembrandt’s home to those of not only such prominent Jewish figures as Ben Israel and Baruch Spinoza, but also such important artists as Hendrick Uylenburgh, Paulus Potter and Pieter Lastman.

The subjects of Rembrandt’s portraits have provided another clue that museum representatives say has misled aficionados to associate Rembrandt with the Jews. Abraham Bredius was a 19th- and early 20th-century art collector who compiled what is still viewed as the definitive catalogue of Rembrandt’s works. It contains no fewer than 36 paintings, with such titles as “Portrait of a Young Jew” and “Portrait of an Old Jewish Man.” Two of Rembrandt’s most famous works are a portrait of prominent Jewish physician Ephraïm Bueno and an etching of Ben Israel. However, a closer look reveals that most of these paintings were either not actually done by Rembrandt or were not paintings of Jews, after all.

As a painter, Rembrandt was known for his sensitive renderings of faces and expressions. He “was famous for his humanness, for his sympathy for his portrait subjects,” Netherlands-based art historian and Rembrandt expert Gary Schwartz told the Forward. Indeed, Alexander concurred, the artist’s reputation led to the self-fulfilling prophecy whereby “any [painting of a] man with a beard, looking a bit tragic, or having a certain sensitive expression, it’s considered a rabbi, by Rembrandt.”

As part of the preparation for the current exhibition, Alexander and her team tracked down 22 of the 36 portraits in storerooms, galleries and private collections around the world. Over the course of two-and-a-half years, they researched when the paintings acquired their Jewish titles and when they were attributed to Rembrandt. They subjected the paintings to X-rays and expert scrutiny. In the end, they found “only [one] certain portrait of a Jew Rembrandt ever made”: that of Dr. Bueno. The rest were either revealed to be not by Rembrandt or to have acquired their “Jewish” titles later on, after the myth about Rembrandt and the Jews had achieved wide circulation.

It is not disputed that Rembrandt had a relationship with Ben Israel; in 1655, Rembrandt provided illustrations for an early edition of the rabbi’s book, “Piedra Gloriosa.” However, there is no evidence that the men were friends. Even the etching of Menasseh Ben Israel was given its title long after Rembrandt’s death. The Jewish Historical Museum exhibition includes Rembrandt’s etching alongside another etching; that one is by Jewish artist Salom Italia and is known to be of Ben Israel. “People can compare themselves,” Alexander said. “Do these two men look like each other? Do I see the same man?” The answer, according to art historians, is a resounding no. “The face, while there is a family resemblance — and even making an allowance for Italia’s artistic shortcomings — is not close enough,” Nadler wrote in his book.

Throughout the remainder of the exhibit, each aspect of the myth of Rembrandt and the Jews is painstakingly dismantled. Rembrandt’s painting “Jews in the Synagogue,” for example, which depicts the inside of a building that some say closely resembles Amsterdam’s Portuguese synagogue, is revealed to have been painted long before the synagogue was even built. The Jewish title was not given to the painting until the 18th century; a 17th-century catalog called it “Pharisees in the Temple” — “which,” Alexander said, “it clearly is.” Some of Rembrandt’s paintings, for another example, contain well-formed Hebrew characters; however, they also contain Hebrew mistakes — enough to demonstrate that Rembrandt wasn’t particularly familiar with the aleph-bet. “Belshazzar’s Feast,” in particular, mistakenly ends an Aramaic phrase with a zayin instead of with a nun sufit. An X-ray of the painting, on display in the museum’s exhibition, demonstrates Rembrandt’s process: In an attempt to make the nun sufit look like it is in the process of being written, Rembrandt simply painted over the bottom half of it — without realizing that a truncated nun sufit is actually a different letter.

In the end, the myth about Rembrandt and the Jews has “as much to do with the image people have of Jews” as it has to do with Rembrandt, Alexander said. “What most fascinated us was the perception of Jews as suffering, and Rembrandt as suffering, and that Rembrandt’s Jews would reflect his suffering.” Plus, Nadler said, the truth “helps us understand the art. Our appreciation of the art can only benefit from a deeper understanding of the life and the thought behind it.”

Forward>Schmooze>Brandeis Gets Fifteen More Minutes

Brandeis Gets Fifteen More Minutes

By Beth Schwartzapfel
November 17, 2006

Tuesday marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Louis Brandeis, and so in honor of the milestone, the university that bears his name was gifted a most unusual portrait of the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice. Andy Warhol’s “Louis Brandeis,” which the artist created as part of a series called “Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century,” was donated to Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum by the children of prominent New York art dealer Ronald Feldman and unveiled this week at a raucous party at the university’s student center.

Like many Warhol portraits, his “Brandeis” is based on a photograph, said Michael Rush, director of the museum. “It’s a very stately photograph,” Rush told the Forward, “but what he does is he adds geometric shapes of color, and sort of neon outlining around the figures. He created pop stars out of everybody with these portraits.”

Feldman runs a gallery in the SoHo area of New York City that is known for promoting edgy and provocative artwork. He developed a relationship with Warhol in the final decade of the artist’s life; Feldman ultimately commissioned him to create more than 50 paintings, drawings and prints. “Ten Portraits” was the first of these commissions, and it opened in the fall of 1980 at the Jewish Museum in New York. Feldman’s three children, Mark, Andrew and Julie, purchased “Louis Brandeis” from Warhol at the time. “It’s a painting that we really enjoyed, that was really special to us,” Mark Feldman told the Shmooze. “Obviously we’re sorry to see it go, but we really felt that, in honor of Louie Brandeis’s birth, this was the right time to donate it, and that Brandeis the university was the place that it belonged. We feel like it’s at home.”

In addition to Brandeis, Warhol’s “Ten Portraits” series included images of Kafka, Einstein, Gertrude Stein and Golda Meir. The series began as an edition of prints — 200 sets of 10 — and the paintings followed. Rush estimates that the Brandeis portrait is worth between $300,000 and $500,000.

Louis Brandeis made a name for himself as “the people’s lawyer.” He is credited with originating the concept of the right of privacy and with pioneering the use of sociological data to support a legal argument.

The party at which the painting was unveiled featured a crowd of several hundred people and a jazz ensemble. “It felt like a rock concert,” Rush said. “It was very Warholian.”

Rhode Island Monthly>A Dollar and a Dream

A Dollar and a Dream

By Beth Schwartzapfel
September 2006

Bruno Barata is pacing. A chubby but compact boy, Barata can’t seem to stand still. “If you get nervous,” says theater instructor Karen Carpenter, “just take a minute and reconnect with Willie.”

Barata, thirteen, is auditioning to be part of the incoming fall 2006 freshman class at Pawtucket’s Jacqueline M. Walsh School for the Performing and Visual Arts. For his audition, he has chosen to perform one of Willie Loman’s monologues from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. “A pretty mature choice for an eighth grader,” says Carpenter.

When he’s done, Carpenter hands him a packet of paper. It’s a monologue from Tom Griffin’s The Boys Next Door. Barata is supposed to do a cold reading of a monologue by Jack Palmer, the caretaker at a home for developmentally disabled men. “This is what we call direct address, so talk directly to the audience and just enjoy it,” says Carpenter.

He tries to enjoy it. He really does. But he’s just so nervous. So the lines come out sounding not like Jack Palmer, but like a nervous teenager reading them off the page. Carpenter takes a different tack. “Let me ask you a question,” she says. And she makes Barata hunt through the monologue for some details, to help him get to know Jack Palmer.

“How long has he been working there?” (Eight months.)

“How many men live there?” (Seventeen.)

“How old are they?” (Adults.)

“When he says ‘escapades,’ what does he mean?” Barata looks through the script and starts to describe some of the antics of the house’s residents. The meaning of the words suddenly sinks in. He giggles. “Yes!” exclaims Carpenter. “Those are the escapades! Enjoy them!”

Aside from playing improvisation games with his cousins, watching the ABC comedy-improvisation show “Whose Line Is It Anyway,” and generally making people laugh, Barata has had no training that would bring him closer to his goal of being an actor and comedian. But, he says, “I get a feeling when I do it. It just feels right.” He has been meticulous about preparing his audition, calling the school several times to confirm the date and time and to field help in choosing his monologue. That enthusiasm, says Carpenter, “that’s the biggest thing.”

Equal parts Fame! and Lean on Me, the Pawtucket public school opened last fall with aspirations to be a competitive conservatory-style school that feeds into such prestigious institutions as Berklee and Julliard. Admission is by audition only, and, in addition to their academic classes, students are subject to a rigorous curriculum in their chosen artistic specialty. At the same time, the school is part of an inner-city school system whose two other high schools — Tolman and Shea — face corrective action, with consistently low test scores and dropout rates above 30 percent. The result of these competing atmospheres is that the school is very much like its students: it has talent and commitment, ambition and drive, but few material resources and little formal training.

The Walsh School was the brainchild of Pawtucket Public Schools superintendent Hans Dellith. The year was 2000. Members of the Gamm Theatre company, having outgrown their quarters in Providence, hatched the idea of turning the empty Pawtucket Armory into a center for the arts, with themselves as lead tenants. Seth Handy, then the president of the Gamm’s board, approached Dellith about collaborations between the potential new arts center and the Pawtucket School Department: perhaps the Gamm could stage plays in the schools, or the kids could come over to the Armory to work with the artists? Dellith took it up a notch. Perhaps Pawtucket needed an arts high school. “I’d go to school productions, and I’d see a tremendous amount of talent with the students,” says Dellith, who has headed the school department for nine years.” I came up with the idea that maybe what we should do is broaden our horizons and start thinking about what we could do for students in terms of training them.”

The newly established Pawtucket Armory Association negotiated with the city to buy the hulking castle on Exchange Street for $1 and a promise to perform extensive renovations and reinvent the building as the Arts Exchange. A school for the performing and visual arts was to be one of the building’s first tenants.

If Dellith conceived the Walsh School, then its midwife was an affable and energetic Pawtucket native named Donna Jeffrey. Jeffrey, fifty-five, is a classical guitarist and renaissance lute player who began teaching music in the Pawtucket public schools thirty-two years ago. Jeffrey talks about the arts like a physician talks about medicine. When asked why the arts are important, she replies with another question: “Why is breathing important?” Over the years, she followed whatever career path afforded her as much time as possible with students. Early on in her career, for instance, when the budget for her elementary music education program was slashed, “I went from seeing kids twice, three times a week to seeing them every other week,” she says. “And what teacher can teach anything once every other week?” She responded by creating after-school musical productions that kids could participate in, singing, dancing and acting in Disney stories and other favorites like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. That way, she says, she could “see them not only in music class but also get them after school.” When a high school job became available, the lure of daily music classes was too strong to pass up. “Imagine what I could do if I saw them every day!” she recalls thinking. And so she left for Shea High School, where she taught for eleven years, during which time she created a steel drum ensemble and taught guitar and chorus classes.

Hans Dellith knew a dedicated arts educator when he saw one, so he tapped into Jeffrey’s enthusiasm and experience when the arts high school was in its early stages. She started attending meetings. Then, when a real school began to take shape, she cut her schedule at Shea back to half-time in order to coordinate the nuts and bolts of bringing it into the world: writing curricula, drafting budgets, creating guidelines for hiring, auditions and admissions, and working with architects and construction teams to turn the second and third floors of the armory into classrooms and studios. All along, however, she planned to usher the school into existence and then return to her steel drums. To head the new school, she says, “I wanted a person who was a principal, who had a degree in fine arts, who had experience as an administrator and in the arts. I didn’t want the job.”

But then came June 2005. The Pawtucket city council had been level-funding the school department for more than a decade, so the city had long relied on the state’s yearly increases in contributions. In an economy where costs are always increasing, level-funding is the practical equivalent of slashing funds. When the state announced that it too was level-funding the Pawtucket schools, suddenly the school committee faced $8 million in deficits. The arts school — along with any other expenditure deemed not absolutely necessary — was on the chopping block. In the end, the school eked into existence when Jeffrey, Dellith and others slashed its budget from $1.5 million to $559,000. One of the cuts was the principal’s job, to be replaced by a lower-paid school coordinator. Jeffrey recalls thinking to herself, “If they’re not going to get someone in here who has more experience and knowledge of this than me, then I will go for the job.”

The former deputy superintendent of schools, a much-beloved woman named Jackie Walsh, had died of cancer the previous fall. She had always been an advocate for the arts. Dellith and Jeffrey agreed that naming a new school after her would be a fitting tribute. And so the Jacqueline M. Walsh School for the Performing and Visual Arts opened its doors on August 31, 2005, with Donna Jeffrey at its helm. It had admitted its first freshmen class the previous spring, and the plan was to add a class each year so that the school would have four classes by 2009.

Looking back, it seems to have been the obvious next step for Jeffrey. From every other week, to after school, to every day, she has finally settled in a school where more than three hours a day are dedicated to the arts. “Even in schools that have wonderful music and art programs, kids usually only have one — maybe if they’re lucky, two — classes a day in the arts,” she says. “These kids are living and breathing it all day long.”

And even if they don’t ultimately pursue a degree at a conservatory or a career in the arts, Jeffrey is sure that the school’s curriculum provides a solid enough foundation for students to follow their hearts, wherever they lead.

“I want to be a dancer,” says fifteen-year-old Walsh student Iesha Bemway. She pauses to consider her options. “Or singer. Or actor.”

“Yeah,” chimes in Keisha Fordham, fourteen, also a student. “Cause you always have to have a backup plan, in case things don’t work out.”

Tall, slim and muscular, Bemway has an angular jaw and a big, toothy smile. She and her friends are finishing their lunch in a noisy tall-ceilinged makeshift lunchroom before heading back to class. Zuleika Castro is a dance major at Walsh like Bemway, but she has other career plans. “I want to go to business school,” she says, noting that what she has learned at the Walsh School will help her when she gets there. “In dance, you got to follow all the rules, and trust me, there’s a lot of rules. And you got to take this stuff serious. And if I can take dance serious, I can take that into the business world.”

The Walsh School’s thirty-one students — nine boys and twenty-two girls — start up the armory’s big stone steps around 7:45 a.m., trudging sneakers and boots over the giant anchor mosaic at the top of the landing. Five are music majors, four study theater, ten dance, and twelve focus on visual art. About half receive free or reduced lunch. Those who live outside Pawtucket must pay $15,000 per year tuition; there are only two students who do so, one from Burrillville and one from Central Falls. The school occupies the second and third floors of the armory, and the renovations have lent the space the feeling of both a school and a place with history. The walls are painted in bright yellows and whites. The little bank of lockers is blue. Most classrooms have high ceilings, at least one wall of exposed brick and tall windows.

The students gather in the room on the second floor that serves as classroom, studio and cafeteria for breakfast and the pledge of allegiance. From 8:30 a.m. until 1:45 p.m., they take the usual range of academic subjects. At 2:00 p.m., while giant yellow buses begin pulling up to the curb next door at Tolman High School to take the students home for the day, work at the Walsh School is just beginning. First the students take a crossover class; a music student, for instance, can take a visual art class, or a dancer can take theater. Then they have three hours of class in their chosen major. The three hours are broken up into blocks, which might include theory, exercises and practice.

Nancy Rosenberg, a working composer with the demeanor of a hip mom, is equally comfortable discussing the Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly as the hip-hop duo Outkast. Pairing students with working artists was one of the goals of the school, and this is reflected in the teaching staff. Karen Carpenter, the theater teacher, is in the company at the Gamm. Tovah Bodner, the dance teacher, directs her own dance company called the Robin’s Egg. And Chris Kane, the visual art teacher, is a sculptor who runs the metals foundry at the Steelyard, an industrial art center in Providence.

When auditions for the school were first planned, sight-reading — performing a piece of music by looking at it, without preparation — was to be one of the requirements for the music majors. But in order to sight-read, students have to know how to read music. Many of the auditioning students sang in their church choirs or with their friends, but few had had formal training. The audition criteria were quickly adapted.

“I don’t care if they sight-read,” says music teacher Nancy Rosenberg. “I’ll teach them to sight-read. I am less interested in what training they’ve received before they arrive than in raw talent and commitment.”

It’s a good thing that the students, for the most part, are starting from scratch. It’s a good thing, too, that they have the dedication required to stick it out despite tough circumstances. Because a student who is already a musical impresario might find the resources at the Walsh School to be somewhat lacking. For instance, when the class studies music theory, Rosenberg pulls out a giant cardboard keyboard, with Velcro dots marking the notes they’re discussing. It’s a far cry from the school where she previously taught, the Boston Arts Academy, a public school much like what the Walsh School aspires to be. It has a full recording studio, every imaginable musical instrument and five music faculty. Comparing the two schools is like “apples and oranges,” says Rosenberg. The Walsh School, on the other hand, has five synthesizers, a battered upright piano and a lengthy wish list:

Drum set with cymbals: $2,000.
Grand piano for performances: $9,000.
Two baby grand pianos: $7,000 each.
Electric guitar, amplifier and case: $800.

That’s only part of the wish list, and that’s only for music. Under “general equipment,” the list even includes twenty cases of Xerox paper and twenty bottles of Wite-Out. “We’ve been living on next to nothing,” says Jeffrey. Aside from the teachers’ salaries and the lease, which the school department pays, “everything has been donated or bought by me,” she says. However, “it’s more important that we’re open than that we have everything we need.”

While Bruno Barata is downstairs pacing during his audition, a handful of other eighth graders wait upstairs for their turn. Marc Tiberius has been acting in after-school programs at Slater Middle School. He had planned to go to Shea High School, until he heard about this school. “I was really excited to find out there was a school for acting,” he says. His dad is excited, too. “I would have killed to have a school like this,” he says.

Jeffrey and Dellith had hoped that each of the admitted classes would have one hundred students, with the number of students topping out at 400 in 2009. However, the numbers have been disappointing so far. Last year, sixty-five auditioned, forty-five were accepted, and thirty-three came (two have since left). This year’s auditions have yielded roughly the same results. They blame the low numbers on the fact that the school’s fate has been so uncertain. In August of last year, just weeks before the school was scheduled to open, Jeffrey was forced to send a letter to the families of newly admitted students warning that the school might not open after all. And though it did finally happen, the construction wasn’t finished in the Armory yet, so the students had to spend the first few weeks in the old Registry Building. Dellith still can’t promise that the school will survive past its infancy, though he says he will continue to fight to keep it open. “These parents are the pioneers,” acknowledges Jeffrey. “There are a lot of families that would have liked to send their kids here, but they were afraid to take the chance. And I feel sad for them.”

The school’s small size, however, has had a positive consequence: family atmosphere. “We see this small group of students every day,” says biology teacher Julia Goulet. “We get a better idea of what their day is going like, and what might be going on in their lives that might be interfering with their schoolwork. It’s a luxury to have the classes be small and manageable.”

What’s more, that the students are committed to their art contributes to a unique atmosphere. “In many other schools,” says Spanish teacher Kayla Campbell, “kids have no interest in school at all. These kids have an interest in being here.” Goulet, who taught at Tolman High School for thirty-five years, says the biggest difference she sees is in attendance. Walsh boasts an attendance rate of 96 percent, at least 10 percent higher than attendance at other Pawtucket public schools. “They want to be here,” she says. “They are here every day.”

Hans Dellith can’t dance.

He says that he has not two, but three left feet. But he knows the power of dancing. “What distinguishes us from the animal world are things like art, philosophy, music, dance, theater,” he says. “All the things that really make us human, these things are very important.” He recalls a day that he visited Tovah Bodner’s class; his dedication to art education was redoubled by what he saw there. “I’m watching this student do a dance routine, and I’m watching the intensity of her performance,” he says. “I’ve never seen that type of intensity in a math class, in an English class, in a phys-ed class, or anywhere else.”

At a time when budgets are being slashed at public schools around the country, the arts are usually the first to go. Nancy Rosenberg herself used to teach music at Feinstein High School in Providence, until her position was cut. “I became a professional musician studying music in the public schools,” she says. “That’s almost impossible right now.” She likens teaching art in a public school to the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, wherein a besieged Jim Carrey must chase after his memories as they are being eliminated. “I feel like I’m running around as the music programs are disappearing underneath me,” says Rosenberg. “People don’t understand what is at stake when you do that.”

Unfortunately, Rosenberg was more correct than she could have known in February. Over the summer, she was laid off from the Walsh School due to cutbacks in the city’s school department, and replaced by a music teacher with seniority in the Pawtucket public schools, as per union policy.

Every student, whether or not he possesses natural artistic talent, deserves a chance to study art, “the opportunity to be exposed to a musical way of thinking,” in Rosenberg’s words. And while the Walsh School offers art education only to those students who are talented and dedicated enough to audition, be accepted and work hard, it marks a resounding commitment to the arts by a beleaguered public school system that could have said “not now.”

It’s been worth every minute, says Donna Jeffrey, to help the students work toward their goals. “I want them to choose the field they’re happy in,” she says. “I want them to go off and light the world on fire in whatever area is their love.”

Providence Phoenix>Iron Lady

Iron Lady
Drake Patten makes creative sparks fly at the Steelyard

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 20, 2006

Things could have taken a turn for the worse when Providence Steel and Iron, after 98 years of operation, closed shop in 2002. “You have this 2.9-acre piece of property on the other side of you, when you already have a strip mall on the other side,” says 27-year-old metals artist Clay Rockefeller, referring to the stores that opened in Eagle Square in 2003, displacing the underground arts hotbed Fort Thunder and the 100-some artists who called it home. “And you’re trying to preserve some sort of the integrity, or the aspects of what was really great about this place. The fear was basically that if we didn’t get our shit together and purchase it, it was going to turn into a Wal-Mart. It just was not a pretty thought.”

Rockefeller, who, with three partners, had spearheaded the conversion of the adjacent Monohasset Mill complex into live-work lofts for artists, joined forces with fellow artist Nick Bauta to buy the Providence Steel and Iron site, reinventing it as the Steelyard (www.thesteelyard.org). The vision, as Rockefeller puts it, was for “an industrial arts facility and education center that would simultaneously celebrate the site’s history and the industrial heritage of Providence and Rhode Island as a whole.” A nonprofit, Woonasquatucket Valley Community Build (WVCB), was launched in 2003 to administer the effort, encompassing studio space for industrial artists and classes in welding, ceramics, blacksmithing, foundry, and glass.

Three years later, WVCB is ready to integrate a new level of professionalism into what has been more of a shoot-from-the-hip operation, hiring Drake Patten as the Steelyard’s new executive director. A former archaeologist, Patten, 42, led what is now known as the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities from 1999-2004, and then directed an artists’ colony in Austerlitz, New York. She started at the Steelyard two months ago, supplanting Peter Eiremann, who moved to Maine.

Here are edited excerpts from our conversation, which took place last week at the Icon Café on Valley Street.

BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL: How would you sum up what goes on at the Steelyard? I know Clay said, “When people ask me what we do, [and] they come away from our conversations, they’re like, ‘It sounds cool, though I’m not really sure what he told me.’ ”

DRAKE PATTEN: [Laughs] It’s exactly right. And actually, that’s one of the funniest things about the Steelyard. When I first came back and I was [telling] everyone, “So I’m going to be at the Steelyard,” and they would say, “That’s so cool!” And I would say, yeah, well, what do you think the Steelyard does? And everybody has a different answer. In some ways, everybody who’s involved in the Steelyard has a different answer. And as an executive director, I would say that’s a catastrophe, because everybody should know what you do. But in fact, that’s part of the key to the Steelyard — that people come there and take away different things. That’s part of what makes it work on some level.

We teach welding and blacksmithing, everything from welding classes that take place over the course of five or six weeks, but also weekend welding workshops. For example, this year we had a “Welding with Mom” workshop for Mother’s Day. And ceramics, and also glass-casting and bronze-casting. So they’re all industrial arts that can take an industrial focus or a fine arts focus, really.

[We have] open studios. People [who] want to use the very equipment that they can’t have in their own space are able to do that. You can rent time in the studio. Another big part is that we do a lot of collaborative work with organizations. So we’ll do a collaborative project with the Met School, or we’ll install some kind of urban furniture piece in a park where kids are playing. We’re out doing stuff in the community; we’re collaborating. The urban furniture line has been a really amazing growth. We now have garbage cans all over town. We make bike racks, tree guards, garbage cans. It looks like we’re going to be developing a bench now. We are competitive with the stuff that you can order out of catalogues.

We get calls all the time from people who are interested in getting our opinion on stuff, or they want to start an arts organization somewhere else, or they might want to come and do something with us. And what’s amazing is, the staff gets together, and there are all these ideas on the table immediately. So I also think it’s a bit of a think tank, without anyone ever having defined it that way. There’s not a person there who would ever define themselves in that way. But I think it’s happening there, sort of in an ad hoc kind of way.

BS: What is your budget?

DP: The budget we just passed is right under $400,000, which is extraordinary. It has doubled each year, incrementally. So last year it was $200,000, and the year before that, it was just under $100,000. It’s been a steady climb. And it’s a really manageable budget. It’s an extraordinary achievement for an organization this young.

BS: You’ve spoken with enthusiasm about working in Rhode Island’s nonprofit community. What are some of the things that you most love about it?

DP: I think the scale of this community is both a curse and a blessing. But it also allows for innovation in the way we do our work. It allows for collaboration that’s actually quite real and grounded. It’s not just on paper. And also, interestingly enough — I’m not sure everyone thinks of this — but Rhode Island allows you to make mistakes and pick yourself up from that. So organizations can falter, and people give you room. Maybe it’s the spirit of the people who come here. Maybe it’s the size. Maybe it’s the way people have belief in each other. But there is something about being here.

It was amazing to live in the Berkshires, in the middle of what’s considered such a cultural mecca, and feel that it has nothing on Rhode Island. Not that they weren’t great people, not to say there wasn’t stuff to do, but it just doesn’t have that kind of sense that we’re in this together, and we’re going to make this work. And even though a lot of people will say, “Oh, we’ve got replication of nonprofits,” I still think that there’s a lot of support within that, and that’s so significant. You don’t have enough funding to do it all, and all those things are true, like in any community. But we’ll take hold of each other, and do it. And I love that.

BS: When you came back, what stood out for you about the Steelyard?

DP: I’d been very aware of what the Steelyard’s been doing. It was very clear when they were talking big dreams of what the place could be — I just knew that they’d make it happen.

So I’ve just really had an eye on it, and really felt like it grew naturally. I felt it grew in a legitimate way. I hate the word “authenticity” — these words we overuse. But it is the most authentic place.

I really like affecting the local. And I like the local to provide national opportunity in the sense of a model. And I feel like the Steelyard is deeply about the local, but has the potential to show far and wide the power of that. I believe that if something is built truly, it’s always a good model. Not to be replicated, but to see the inspiration of what made the thing happen, and [to] try to bring that to the world. Plus, I get to take all the classes, which is pretty fabulous.

BS: Rockefeller told me that one reason they looked to you for executive director was the need to rein in the sort of rampant idealism — I think his words were “tighten up the ship” and “batten down the hatches” — without losing the sense of possibility. And he said you fit perfectly with that. How do you plan to do that?

DP: That’s exactly the challenge — to keep what’s the wide-ranging possibility, [the] kind of “wow, let’s do this tomorrow” — keep that energy — but allow the organization to grow and seem serious enough for funders to want to be part of it.

Sitting here today, two months in, do I have the master plan? No. But what I think is really important is for the organization to have a little bit of a four- [to] five-year-plan of what we’d like to look like. It’s such a young organization, and it’s been moving so fast, that there hasn’t even been the time to slow down, take a breath, and think about that.

So what we’re facing is acquisition of the property. [Woonaquatucket Valley Community Build currently leases the Steelyard site from the for-profit corporation established by Rockefeller and Bauta to acquire the property.] So we’re looking at an acquisition phase, and development of the site, and taking our mission and also looking at — is everything we’re doing totally tied to our mission? If not, why not? Can it be? [And] if it really isn’t, letting it go. We’ll probably do a little fine-tuning of the mission. It’s really a save-the-world mission right now, which I think is the energy of the place. But we do have to write something a little tighter. That’s part of the first year’s work, things like that.

And the organization’s also rethinking — and I think this is something we very much have to offer Providence and others — how a nonprofit works. There is about a 50 percent earned-income strategy at the Steelyard right now. Meaning, we support what we do through income from our tuition, from the urban furniture line, from our foundry.

Again, like the rest of the organization, the foundry allows artists to do work they might not be able to do, as in bronze-casting. It’s expensive — you’re not likely to set up your own foundry. People can come in with one small sculpture and get it cast with us. They might have to wait a little while, but it can happen. So we’re supporting that art form. More and more foundries are shutting down. It’s very hard for an artist to find an affordable place to cast one thing. So that’s another form of income for us. Nonprofits have been talking about earned income for years now, because everything else is drying up — what can we sell, what can we do, to bring in income?

BS: Because nonprofits rely heavily on grants, but if the grants dry up, then . . .

DP: You’re screwed. All your money’s gone. So it’s been a trend to look at how to make social change through a different kind of economy. But the interesting thing about the Steelyard is, it’s really exploring this in an incredible way. And if we’re able to do this successfully, which I fully believe we are, then that offers a model.

Yes, nonprofits are important. We’ve got to keep them around. And here’s a way we might be able to do it if the traditional way doesn’t work. Which we’re seeing is not working. As the government continues to cut social services and the private sector is asked to step up to the plate, there are so many organizations and so few dollars. So nonprofits have to be thinking about themselves as businesses in some way, without losing sight of the mission [that] makes them different from a business.

BS: What is the symbiotic relationship between the Steelyard and Providence? What does one have to offer the other?

DP: It goes back to that word I hate — authenticity. This is happening in the right place at the right time. And there’s something magical about that. This is taking a steelyard that was shutting down, which is symbolic of the lost industry in the state. It’s really painful, when you think about it — the loss of industry, industrial jobs, manufacturing.

So here this steelyard comes up in the middle of a place that was going to close down, and just become a brownfield with God knows what, maybe more condos, I don’t know. It doesn’t. It stays, in this really interesting way. And it reintroduces what Rhode Island has always been about. If you look back historically, you started out with fine craftsmanship, metalworking. Historically, that’s our past. The real hands-on craftwork that happened in Rhode Island, individual craftman’s shops, and then we had the jewelry industry, and metalworking. So we had all this history. And abruptly, we hit this century, and it really stopped.

Many places are completely gone — other places are dying. There’s something wonderful about a group of young people saying, “You know what? We’re going to just change that story, here, on this little three-acre site. We’re going to rethink that. And we’re going to offer an alternative.” We’re re-inserting this tradition in a very new way, in a public way, in a community-produced way, and we’re going to show that yes, artists can be employed here. Metalwork can survive here.

BS: How would you sum up the mission of the Steelyard?

DP: I would see it as really allowing people to come in and explore the creative possibilities of industrial arts. Allowing people to come in and try something that they never imagined they could do. In a larger way, we’re also trying to say, this is a local story. These are things that are produced locally. One of our major things, we allow local artists to work local. We provide opportunities at the Steelyard that individual studios can rarely afford to have. We are really creating this artists’ support system that is unique.

And it’s not just about what machines we have — though we have fabulous machines — it’s about connecting people with a lot of experience, people who are just starting out . . . . [If I] were to write one-sentence mission statement about the Steelyard, it really is about creating this crossroads, this place where people can come together, share their ideas, explore new ideas, get shaken up by something they’d never thought of.

BS: So you don’t think this project could happen anywhere else the way it’s happened here?

DP: No.