For the first time on public display, the completed “Art Cube” by Chords and Oil will be seen at the Topeka Home Builder’s Association 2010 Home Show, “Home is Where the Art Is.” The six and a half foot “Art Cube” was started by Chords and Oil as a live art interaction at the Arty Party (Arts Connect) in October, 2009. The cube is a celebration of Topeka, a great arts town.

“We are committed to partnering with other groups to accomplish our progressive vision for Topeka,” said said Andrea Engstrom, Chords and Oil board member.

Chords and Oil is an art collective consisting of 100 members, of which the average age is 28. The Chords and Oil Board of Directors consists of visual artists, musicians, poets, filmmakers, arts advocates, social activists, active volunteers, students and young professionals. The group formed in December, 2008 with the mission of effecting positive change to the Topeka arts community and, in doing so, to better the city of Topeka as a whole.

“We have a fundamental belief that people who are involved with the arts and given a chance to have an outlet for their creativity become better citizens,” said Chad Manspeaker, founding member of Chords and Oil.

Chords and Oil initiatives include public murals, community gardening and downtown revitalization. The group believes that a vibrant downtown would help the arts in Topeka by providing a setting for cultural progress. Chords and Oil members hope to create positive change through public service, by focusing on community beautification, environmental protection and education.

Since its debut event in Januray 2009, Chords and Oil has received positive feedback from the Topeka community.  “We have seen an absolute outpouring of support for what we are doing,” said Engstrom. “It is giving us momentum and motivating our group to dream bigger dreams for Topeka.”

The show is at Exhibition Hall, and is open at these times:

March 5th, Noon to 7 pm
March 6th, 9 am to 7 pm
March 7th, 10 am to 5 pm

If you made it to the Arty Party last fall – you might remember the Art Cube. Come see the finished product at the Home Show! This is the first public showing of our mobile, 256 square foot, collaborative, interactive mural featuring a theme of Kansas Progress.

Helping Hands Humane Society future location, Dillon’s Crossing, 21st and Belle, Topeka

February 27, 2010 at 10:00 am (approximately one hour)

Please join us for a gathering of artists to meet with the Arts Committee of Helping Hands Humane Society, Inc. The Committee is formulating a Request For Proposals (RFP) to select an artist or team of artists to help make the new shelter an exciting, friendly and welcoming place. The Committee would like the input of artists at this meeting before finalizing its RFP and budget.

Design elements include:

· Animal mobiles
· Interior directional signage
· Interior color schemes
· Designs for one or possibly two mascots
· Other suggested elements that help achieve our goal

The Committee is also interested in an interior mural, which may or may not be part of the initial RFP.

The meeting will be held inside the new facility at 21st and Belle on the eve of its remodeling. The new rooms in the building have been laid out on the floor with masking tape, so that persons attending will get an initial sense of place and space.
To reserve your place, please contact Mary Ann Earp, Chairperson at rbemae@sbcglobal.net

The show is from 10-8 on Friday and Saturday, and 11-5 on Sunday.

And keep your eyes peeled – we’ll be at the Topeka Home Builders Association Home Show the first weekend in March.

See you this weekend! 

Chords & Oil will be working on the next panel of Topeka’s Great Mural Wall.

http://www.refresheverything.com/greatmuralwalltopeka

The Great Mural Wall of Topeka was initiated in 2006 by the Chesney Park Neighborhood Improvement Association with a desire to instill community pride, beautify the neighborhood, and curtail graffiti.  The project honors the cultural history and ongoing spirit of Topeka’s neighborhoods.

The 900-foot wall, located in the Chesney Park Neighborhood, was originally a city water reservoir. It has now become the canvas for a community wide mural painting effort that is supported by a multitude of neighborhood organizations and volunteers.

Under the direction of nationally recognized mural artist Dave Loewenstein, community members have researched, designed, and painted scenes depicting Topeka’s rich history.  As of the fall of 2009 over 400 feet of the Great Mural Wall has been painted.   Our goal for 2010 is to complete another 120 feet of mural and complete painting the entire 900 feet of the Great Mural Wall of Topeka by 2012. – Please Vote Now!

1. Next meeting – Feb 16 or 20?
2. Garden Show – planning and pay $27.50 for booth?
3. Home Show
4. Great Mural Wall
5. Knitting project
6. T-Shirts remaining:
   S – 2
   M – 3
   L – 2
   XL – 5
7. What else can we sell/make to raise a little money?
8. Topeka Community Cycle Project

HEY ALL YOU INDEPENDENT FILM MAKERS OUT THERE! Get the new year started out right by submitting your work to the 2010 KCK FILM FESTIVAL. They are only taking submissions for another day or two so you have to contact Patrick now. He is a great guy and i know will work with you to make this happen. If you want this to be the year that you are discovered-you have got to start sometime, someplace. It’s a great opportunity  - don’t miss it – Call or email NOW!!! details attached. TELL YOUR FRIENDS!

What is ReThink Topeka?

Topeka artist Justin Marable will showcase his interpretations of the Capital City at “Why ReThink,” a new exhibit 3-5 p.m. Saturday Dec. 19 at Lola’s Café.

Last September, Marable sent out a call for art to the city and the region for the event, “ReThink Topeka,” which will occur April 17, 2010 in downtown Topeka. In the meantime, he has found fresh ways to perceive Topeka and continues to “ReThink” the city on a daily basis. The show “Why ReThink” is an effort to energize local and regional artists and will serve as a reminder to participate in the coming “ReThink Topeka” event April 2010.

“I’m hoping that people will use the show as inspiration to make their own ReThink Topeka art, or to begin expressing pride in this place we call home,” said Marable.

The art exhibit will be on display beginning Dec. 1, featuring screenprints of Marable’s work that deals with places in Topeka and written explanations of why he decided to “ReThink” that location.

A formal opening will be held 3-5 p.m., Saturday, Dec. 19. The opening will feature Topeka-centered poetry readings by Matt Porubsky and Leah Sewell, the live music of local band Interior Sea and discussions about Topeka as inspiration for local artists, musicians, writers and performers. Visitors will also be able to find out more about the coming April 2010 “ReThink Topeka” event, and merchandise such as stickers, pins and t-shirts will be available. Marable welcomes anyone to the show who is supportive of battling negative perceptions about Topeka and helping to create a more positive representation.

Check out the Facebook event for additional photos, or to invite your friends.

AN empty pizza box was propped against a black fiberglass urn in the hallway outside Three’s Company, a gallery that is also the living room of Alex Gartenfeld and Piper Marshall, roommates in a tiny tenement walkup in Chinatown.

“That’s what can happen to the art after a show,” said Mr. Gartenfeld, indicating the urn, which he explained had been part of an installation last spring by AIDS-3D, a Berlin-based duo who were in the “Younger Than Jesus” show at the New Museum. That the urn was still there was a source of annoyance to both Mr. Gartenfeld and his roommate, he said. “We just don’t have the room.”

It was noon on a recent Saturday, and Mr. Gartenfeld, 23, a slight young man who favors owlish glasses and black-and-white clothing, had just awakened, brushed his teeth in the kitchen sink and opened the gallery for business. Et voilà: There were pieces by Asher Penn, who prints the words “KATE MOSS RORSHACH” over and over on white tape and then makes collages from the tape, set out on a shelf that ringed the narrow living room. A projector on a table was loaded with a film by another artist, Tobias Kaspar, apparently featuring a close-up of hands flipping through a fanzine devoted to Leonardo DiCaprio. But because Mr. Gartenfeld does not know how to work the projector — that’s Ms. Marshall’s talent and she was at work — this reporter had to imagine it.

But she got the picture. Fastidious obsession, with both making stuff and celebrity culture, was the theme of the current show, which is open by appointment and up indefinitely.

Also on view: a sofa, a lamp and a few molded plastic chairs, one with a beer can on its seat. Art?

“Not art,” said Mr. Gartenfeld, whisking the can away.

In a home gallery, sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Mr. Gartenfeld and Ms. Marshall, both of whom have day jobs in the art world (he’s the online editor at Interview and Art in America; she’s the assistant curator at the Swiss Institute), are part of a new wave of gallerists who for a grab-bag of reasons — economic, philosophical and purely pragmatic — are turning their homes into art galleries.

Some are creating roving galleries, this year’s version of the “Happening” for the post-grad set, or one-night events in other people’s homes, like the Apartment Show or Parlour, which are put together by young artists or curators, and romp from living room to living room and neighborhood to neighborhood like punk bands “touring” suburban basements.

Even at the high end, established dealers like the glamorous Palm Beach, Fla., gallerist Sarah Gavlak are opening their homes: through Dec. 19, Ms. Gavlak’s one-bedroom pied-à-terre, in a prim ’60s white brick building on 57th Street, is given over to the paintings of Christopher Milne, an artist who creates stylized images inspired by women’s magazines of the “Mad Men” era.

Like 17th-century salonistes, home gallerists use the intimacy of their homes — or other people’s — to incite discussion and forge a deeper connection to the art.

“You can get comfortable in someone’s home,” said Leslie Rosa-Stumpf, an independent curator who is half of Parlour, a nomadic gallery that will appear this Saturday in a town house in Bushwick, Brooklyn. “It’s not a white room with no furniture. People sit on the couch, have a drink, stay for hours and really take it all in.”

While noting that apartment shows do not exactly represent a new format, David Rimanelli, a longtime contributor to Artforum who teaches criticism and art history at New York University, described them as “the ultimate destination galleries.”

AT the opening for Mr. Milne’s show last month, Ms. Gavlak, 40, wore a scarlet shift with a nipped-in waist and plunging décolletage, neatly matching Mr. Milne’s idealized vision of womanhood. In her bedroom, which is open to gallery goers, her bed wore ivory satin, and a Hollywood Regency-style acrylic vanity table, a gift from Beth Rudin DeWoody, the collector, displayed carefully curated personal effects: perfume bottles, a clutch of embroidered handkerchiefs, roses in a vase. Draped above was a knitted banner by the artist Lisa Anne Auerbach that read “Vive La Révolution d’amour.”

“I’m really interested in the history of the boudoir and what went on there,” Ms. Gavlak said. “It’s fun to watch people when they come into the bedroom. Some are really uncomfortable and just walk out. Others flop down on the bed and hang out for a while. If you look at the apartment as a whole, everything is an aesthetic design in a way, including me, and each thing informs the other things.”

Ms. Gavlak’s apartment began its gallery career by accident. After showing photographs by Ms. Auerbach during Art Basel Miami Beach two years ago, Ms. Gavlak brought the photos to New York, where she spends half the year, and gave a party for Ms. Auerbach in the apartment.

“People were like, ‘When’s the next show?’ ” she said. “Or they said, ‘It looks like a gallery in here, do you really live here? Where’s all your stuff?’ ”

It is stunningly spare. Ms. Gavlak’s personal effects are in one of two walk-in closets; artwork is in the other. Like a good saloniste, she eats breakfast on a tray in bed and then slides it underneath the dust ruffle. Her kitchen is as clean and uncluttered as that of a model apartment in a new condominium. (Home gallerists as a whole are not given to the display of random tchotchkes; further, they know how to hide their hair brushes and the Verizon bill.)

Relations with artists can be very cozy. When she was courting Mr. Milne, whose work she had seen at a collector’s home in Palm Beach, and arranging for a studio visit on the phone one day, she and Mr. Milne realized they lived in the same building.

“We were both in our apartments when I phoned, and when we figured it out, he said, ‘Omigosh, I’m coming downstairs right now,’ ” Ms. Gavlak said.

Perhaps the most famously intimate home gallery is Gracie Mansion’s bathroom, otherwise known as the “Loo Division.” As Ms. Mansion, an impresario of the ’80s-era East Village art scene, recalled recently, it was the spring of 1982, and she came up with the idea of doing a show — or having a party, really — with the proceeds of her tax refund.

Ms. Mansion, now a private art adviser and a modern and contemporary specialist for artnet’s online auctions, was making art and living in a fifth-floor walkup on East Ninth Street. It was the kind of apartment that had a bathtub in the kitchen and a toilet in a closet, the latter “an intimate setting,” she realized, uniquely positioned “for one-at-a-time viewing.”

She had been given a few photographs by her friend Tim Greathouse — who, like so many of her peers, has since died of AIDS — and had hung them inside the bathroom. “While contemplating them one day,” Ms. Mansion said, “I came up with the idea of giving him a show in there.”

The arts culture that erupted in Ms. Mansion’s neighborhood around that time was at a literal and emotional distance from chilly SoHo and glitzy 57th Street: it was, in the beginning anyway, a community by and for artists, she stressed. “These were not market-driven events,” she said.

Today, suggested Jed Perl, the art critic for the New Republic and author of “New Art City,” a social history of Manhattan’s ’50s-era art scene, when art is atomized all over town and across the East River, a home gallery is “maybe just part of a broader mix-it-up mentality: i.e., an industrial loft can be a home, a home can be a gallery, et cetera.”

“Is there a history to it?” he continued. “I’m not sure. My impression of many of the hostess/salon-running/gallerist types — from Peggy Guggenheim to Holly Solomon — is that they made a fairly clear distinction between home and gallery. Certainly in the secondary market there has always been a strong tradition of people who deal out of their homes, where ‘everything’ is for sale: the Tiffany lamp, the Navajo rug, the Guercino drawing.

“As for the East Village-to-today galleries in the home, maybe in spirit it’s related to Happenings and so forth. But isn’t the truth that as soon as the cash flow is strong enough, people prefer to move the business to a separate location? So it’s also — let’s face it — a style born of necessity?”

True, yet a low overhead, as some gallerists point out, means you can support and show artists whose work is not market-oriented.

BERNARD LEIBOV was itching for a life change when he was downsized as managing director of a design studio last January. A few years earlier, Mr. Leibov, an investment banker turned brand strategist who is now 46, had attended a Landmark Education workshop — a self-actualizing program that owes a lot to the ’70s-era est movement — eager to shake a corporate career and start one in the arts. He began curating shows featuring artists from his native South Africa. He also made a pilgrimage to Joshua Tree, the art world’s alternative universe in the California desert, which inspired him to make his own work.

Back in New York, “my relationship with my apartment had grown stale,” Mr. Leibov said of the Printing House loft he has lived in for 12 years. “I had fallen out of love with it, it didn’t inspire me anymore.”

The day he was laid off, he said, he felt a kind of release. “I was like, O.K., now I know what I’m doing,” which was to bring a larger audience to the Joshua Tree community he’d become a part of.

In March, he had his first home show, of the work of the Joshua Tree artist John Luckett, who makes abstract mixed-media pieces. Mr. Leibov’s current show, his fourth, is called “Satellite of Love” and features armfuls of glowing cast-glass sex toys in rainbow colors tucked into strappy handbags, also made of cast-glass, which makes an exciting backdrop for his morning coffee. The show, up through Dec. 19, is the work of another Joshua Tree resident, Randy Polumbo.

Mr. Leibov’s relationship with his apartment has been similarly rejuvenated. “I’d been looking for ways to pep it up,” he said. “I had felt a lack of energy when I came home. Now, it’s fantastic. I get to live like a big-time collector.”

ON the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Jill Greenwood, 26, an architectural designer, lent the large railroad apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, she was about to vacate to the Apartment Show organizers, Joshua Smith and Denise Kupferschmidt, who are friends of friends. Ms. Greenwood had already half-decamped, but there was still a lot of her stuff there, including a pile of shoes in a corner, when the show opened that night.

Schooled in the viewing of conceptual art, some attendees were puzzled, Ms. Greenwood said. “People definitely confused my shoes for artwork, and thought I’d messed up the art when I changed out of my flats to heels for the show.”

The work of six artists was on view, and there were 150 or so guests at the opening, the 12th Apartment Show organized by Mr. Kupferschmidt and Mr. Smith, both of whom are artists and were inspired, they said, to show the work of their peers to their peers.

When they began last year, Mr. Smith said: “I felt like everyone was throwing around the word ‘context’ all the time, meaning they all wanted their work to be shown ‘in the proper context,’ typically code for a well-branded institutional space. This is a way to get people to loosen up a little and just hang out and relax.”

Since their first show last January, at another friend’s apartment in Greenpoint, they have never wanted for a space, for artists to show or for guests, whom they found by drawing from the mailing lists of the galleries where they worked and by tapping the Facebook “friends” of Jerry Saltz, the art critic at New York magazine.

“He has like 3,000 friends,” Mr. Smith said. (Actually, as of this week he had 4,230.)

As most of the apartments donated are rentals, given at the end of a lease, Ms. Kupferschmidt said: “Often, we’re the last people in them. We clean up after the party, but it’s like we’re cleaning up after them, too. It’s like the apartment was ours and we’re leaving it forever.”

NINE years ago, Brookie Maxwell, an artist, was running a nonprofit arts group for at-risk inner-city children, but wanted a job that would allow her to be a work-at-home mother to her son, Ellis, who was then 4. She bought a loft on West 17th Street, put her living quarters in the back, and created a wide-open central space ringed with canvas on three sides. Ms. Maxwell, who is 53 and the daughter of the legendary New Yorker editor William Maxwell, has been showing art in all media there ever since.

The other day, a video by Zefrey Throwell was playing on one canvas wall — an extremely upsetting film depicting the artist’s girlfriend as she tries (and succeeds) to make herself faint by hyperventilating. Happily, the inevitable doesn’t take too long; afterward, as this reporter recovered, Ms. Maxwell pulled back the canvas to show Ellis’s basketball hoop. “It’s good when I have a video show,” she said, “because then he and his friends can play basketball.”

Indeed, Ellis and his friends have accrued many perks from Gallery 138, as it’s known. Five years ago, for a show commemorating Brown v. Board of Education, the artist Satch Hoyt was working on a life-size cast-sugar bust of Justice Thurgood Marshall. Trying to get it just right, he made several tests during the course of a week, all of which were stored in the fridge (the kitchen is hidden behind another curtain).

“Ellis’s friends would come over and ask, ‘Can I lick Thurgood Marshall’s face again?’ ” Ms. Maxwell said.

Most gallery goers don’t realize that Gallery 138 is also a home until they use the bathroom, at which point human nature asserts itself and they start to snoop.

“I can always hear them pull the shower curtain back,” Ms. Maxwell said. “So I put something in there for them to see.”

It’s not bath toys. Nosy art hounds will discover the pelvis bone of some animal topped with a toy alligator. No one has ever commented, she said.

Asking for donations is a possibility, but it’s not sustainable.  Unless it’s toward a certain end (“help us buy this building or pull of this one event”), you’ll saturate your audience by asking for donations all the time.  We are creating value in this community, and people are willing to engage in a monetary exchange for that!

• Sell things we make, like T-shirts and postcards online and at all events
• Charge cover / solicit donations at events
• Make/Sell larger collaborative projects to notable community businesses (like Art Cube)
• Individual Membership: person gets magazine subscription and T-shirt
• Business Membership: business gets “We support Chords & Oil” sticker for their front window, in addition to X magazine subscriptions and X T-shirts.

We could also work out some symbiosis with for-profit businesses – a percentage of sales go to C&O in exchange for C&O hosting events at their venue… things like that.