Maybe it happened in October 1981 when Andy Warhol, a high-living New York pop artist, had taken an interest in Tacoma.
Well, Warhol didn’t so much fancy Tacoma as he fancied Tacoma’s money.
City Hall had announced a $250,000 competition to design a decorative, artistic exterior for the blank canvas of the Tacoma Dome’s future roof. And Warhol once philosophized, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”
Warhol’s giant daisy design didn’t win the competition. But nearly three decades later, we can follow the evolutionary thread of art-as-business in Tacoma.
That thread has become so stout and so interwoven into the essence of Tacoma and its economy that the City of Destiny’s Next Big Thing will revolve around making it the City of Arts.
And it will rise up in the historic brewery district south of the University of Washington Tacoma.
As soon as next month, City Hall expects to sign a $75,000 contract with VIA Architecture of Seattle. The company that helped rewrite Tacoma’s overall plan for downtown – adopted by the council in December – would map out the land-use policies, private-public partnerships, street designs, development strategies and other key components necessary to build a critical mass of commerce around the creative arts and design industries.
Why the brewery district?
Because the City of Tacoma already owns massive holdings of old buildings and raw land there, and it can use the value of those holdings to leverage other investments.
For example, the city’s streets and grounds maintenance department still operates from an old horse barn warehouse and stores its trucks and supplies on a lot that marks the entrance to an abandoned underground railroad tunnel.
In addition, the city owns roughly 6 hillside acres it acquired through purchases and condemnation in the 1990s when it sought to build a new police headquarters. After amassing the property, policymakers decided to locate the police headquarters on Pine Street near the Tacoma Mall.
The district features “a substantial number of historical industrial spaces (that) provide ideal real estate for artists seeking immediate access to production, studio and retail space,” Tacoma’s consultant, Angelou Economics, wrote in its report to the council last year.
Meanwhile, Tacoma successfully banked its most recent renaissance, in part, on the institutional arts – the Washington State History Museum, Museum of Glass, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Chihuly Bridge of Glass – with its spin-off benefit as tourist attraction. Drawing outsiders brings an economic return on investment.
And yet?
Tacoma has failed to nurture its local creative arts talent or capitalize, in an intentional way, on the more organic creative arts and design industries that would complement downtown’s art institutions.
Angelou Economics defines the creative arts and design sector as software design, film production, theater production, music recording, interior and graphic design, advertising, marketing, commercial photography, architecture and urban design. It also includes niche manufacturing of handmade jewelry, glass, ceramic, wooden and metal arts.
We should want these businesses not just for the ka-ching, ka-ching from their cash registers – even though we would get that. (The creative arts and design sector has grown steadily in employment since 2003 with an average annual wage nationally of more than $53,000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.)
However, we should target the creative arts most for the creative talent they employ.
“Businesses in these industries,” Angelou wrote, “tend to cluster (in) locations that will provide a high quality of life and an environment in which creatively minded individuals can flourish.”
VIA Architecture’s work this summer will provide private sessions for arts organizations and multiple open public opportunities for locals to shape how the brewery district morphs into the hub of a newborn arts neighborhood.
“We need to be intentional about it,” said Amy McBride, the city’s arts administrator. “We need to figure out the next steps.”
Some folks just can’t wait.
In anticipation of Tacoma’s leap onto the creative arts bandwagon, the bandwagon’s wheels of innovation have started to spin out some early ideas.
What if, arts entrepreneur Linda Danforth mused recently, Tacoma built the equivalent of the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Historic Old Town Alexandria, Va.?
Inside a three-story former World War II torpedo manufacturing plant, more than 165 artists – in jewelry, glass, photography, printmaking, sculpture and other crafts – work and sell in open studios. An art school, print company, graphic design firm and archaeology museum share the factory space.
“Alexandria took a leap of faith thinking the Torpedo Factory would be an economic development success. And it has,” Danforth said. She makes jewelry and founded Tacoma Art Place, a Hilltop nonprofit art center that provides artists with shared access to equipment, lessons and space.
“There’s so much bubbling up in Tacoma right now,” she said, “the timing just seems right to do something.”
Or, as Andy Warhol once said, “They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785
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