Mike Langton has a couple of retail spaces on the ground floor of his W.A. Knight Building on West Adams Street downtown. The trendy and upscale Chew Restaurant is in one of them with its tuna tartare and stuffed quail.
But the other sits vacant, as it has for eight years. So Langton is offering it up to artists at no rent. Just pay the utilities.
“I’m just trying to be supportive of downtown,” he said. “If we can get the art cooking, it’d help bring the vitality we need.”
It seems simple enough, Downtown property owners have empty spaces they can’t rent. Local artists need spaces.
And now they’re getting together. More art galleries and artists’ studios are opening in storefronts that used to sit empty, staring out at downtown streets through blank glass.
“We know that art and culture have always been a catalyst to revitalizing downtowns,” said Terry Lorince, executive director of Downtown Vision, an organization formed in 2000 by the area’s property owners.
Downtown Vision has been holding its Art Walk for five or six years, bringing people downtown to open galleries and restaurants the first Wednesday of each month. But that’s only once a month.
“We’d been talking about what we needed to do to take art to the next level,” Lorince said. “The economy was making it difficult to lease space. And then [local artist] Jim Draper approached us and said there was a need for more working space.
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“During Art Walk,” she said, “the place was packed. I wouldn’t be surprised if 500 people came through here. I didn’t advertise, didn’t do any publicity, so that’s pretty remarkable.”
(continued at link)
http://jacksonville.com/business/200...ille_buildings
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