Around our ten-year mark, I sent out an email with a simple but momentous question to the board.
Do we need a gallery space?
Our largest expense at the time was the brick-and-mortar space. We were spending about $13,000 a year on walls alone, which at the time was over half our very modest operating budget. My question to the board was: What if we could entertain the concept of Altered Esthetics—without walls?
Though we loved our home in the Q.arma building, the organization had become so much more than the space. It was the board, the interns, and the artists, the workshops and the exhibitions. With our current exhibition schedule we were unbelievably busy and were getting many requests from potential partners that we had to keep turning down. After a few meetings to discuss logistics, budget, and timing with our board and staff, the decision was made. We were taking the show on the road! That was the beginning of our tenth year of exhibitions and the launch of Altered Esthetics without Walls.
For the next year, Altered Esthetics executed exhibitions in a variety of selected community spaces, chosen based on the theme of each exhibit. The very first exhibition was Hug It Out—a cozy show of fabric art that premiered with a fashion show at Republic, a restaurant and bar on Minneapolis’s West Bank. We partnered with Eat My Words, a Northeast Minneapolis bookstore, for Dust Jacket—an exhibition where artists recreated existing covers of their favorite works of literature. Over the course of the year Altered Esthetics popped up at coffee shops, theaters. Angela Hedlund oversaw the feat of logistics. With the Ae without Walls program, our budget got smaller, but our presence in the local community became much bigger. After a year of pop-ups Altered Esthetics landed at its new home: the historic Southern Theater.
This post is adapted from It’s Never Going To Work: A Tale of Art and Nonprofits in the Minneapolis Community. The book includes illustrations by Athena Currier. ©2019 Jamie Schumacher.
It’s Never Going To Work is a light-hearted, illustrated book that offers real-life insights on founding a community space and nonprofit. It provides tools, tips, resources, and camaraderie to community organizers and anybody attempting something new.