The Arts Consortium of Carver County is partnering with the City of Chaska to participate in a market study done by Artspace regarding affordable housing for artists in the City of Chaska. Please consider attending this unique opportunity and share your creative talent and passion for the arts with Artspace.

Artspace Open House Invitation

Artspace is a non-profit group that focuses on creating affordable living space for artists in communities. They are a national group based in Minneapolis, but have projects all over the country including New Orleans, Seattle, New York, etc. They work in a lot of communities that are sort of known for their arts/culture but are very expensive to live in. What they found was that a lot of affordable neighborhoods were attracting artists to live. Once the artists were there, they started creating vibrant neighborhoods where people wanted to hang out. As soon as they created these vibrant neighborhoods, then people wanted to live there, which created more demand for housing, and thus increased the price for rents in the neighborhoods, making it difficult for the artists who made the neighborhoods vibrant to afford to stay and live there. Northeast Minneapolis is a good example of this.

What ArtSpace does is to come in and create the permanent artist living space/studios creating permanent affordability (thus keeping the artists in these neighborhoods long-term) and at the same time creating “maker space” where they can display, sell and teach their art forms, thus bringing the community in to learn how to do things such as painting, pottery, music, glass blowing, metal working, woodworking, etc. Really make these destination places. What Artspace has found is if they put these in the right communities, they can really use it as a tool to make their places more economically vibrant, helping the businesses that are in these spaces be able to thrive.

Artspace is doing an “market study” of Chaska to determine if we would be a good fit for their program. We want to demonstrate to them how diverse and rich our arts community is in Chaska to help demonstrate to them why they should consider Chaska. The Open House is a way for us to “show our strength” by bringing as many artists as possible together to show support for this in our community. Seeking visual, music, literary, performing arts…the more the better!

When/Where:
August 7th at 7 pm in the Event Center in Firemen’s Park. There will be artists performing as part of the open house and also a presentation by Artspace. Will likely last until 9 pm.

Who:
Anybody in our arts community or who is interested in it. Having music, visual and performing arts there would be good. Feel free to reach out to people you know that might enjoy this.

Why:
Chaska wants to be able to help create an environment to help support our Arts community more, and tie it to ways that it can help make our community more economically vibrant-especially in our Downtown. The communities that do this (i.e. Stillwater, Duluth, Red Wing) all experience what a vibrant arts community does to help drive people to come to their communities.

http://www.artspace.org/

Artspace is the leading developer of arts facilities – creating, owning, and operating affordable spaces for artists and small businesses.

Contact Person:
Cindy Anderson, ACCC President 612-386-6156