Arts-driven redevelopment has long been an engine of economic uplift for some industrial neighborhoods, and that has certainly been the case in recent years for Midtown Kingston. The downside of that oft-successful formula, typically, is gentrification, and the introduction of “elitist” businesses that serve the highly educated, rather than the working-class residents of rundown urban areas.
While there’s less it can do to fight spiking rents, The Arc Mid-Hudson has taken a major step toward making the arts accessible in every sense of the word to Midtowners, with the ribbon-cutting last week of the Cornell Creative Arts Center at 129 Cornell Street. Known for providing services to people with developmental and intellectual disabilities, the organization is committed to hosting a program of “supported” art classes in its new space.
But there’s much more to this ambitious project than renovating an old textile factory to make it thoroughly ADA-compliant and hiring special ed-trained art teachers. Here, “accessible” also means affordable and welcoming to the entire community, including those with no disabilities at all.
In terms of identifying its target audience, Cornell Creative Arts Center art director Rachel Jacob says, “The idea is 50/50. Our goal is community integration and inclusion. The Center offers adaptations for people with disabilities, but it’s open to anyone.” The new project’s official stated mission is “to cultivate a synergy between businesses, artists and people with disabilities working creatively together and empowering one another in order to achieve their goals and reach their true potential.”
The facilities include a public gallery space, a large open ceramics studio, a dance/movement studio, a digital arts/media studio, a painting/drawing/mixed-media studio, and a space for music therapy. A co-working space is now offering membership timeshare plans at $12 a day, $80 a month and $875 a year; and several private artist studios at affordable rents – about a dollar per square foot, according to Jacob – had a soft opening in June.
Youko Yamamoto, the former proprietor of New Paltz’s Gomen-Kudasai whose plans for a new noodle restaurant called Gomen-Ramen at Broadway and Cedar Street in Kingston were delayed by the onset of Covid-19, is among those who have already taken a studio, as a space to create her Japanese calligraphy and graphic artworks.
Launch of the new space has been gradual, due to restrictions on in-person gatherings. The first art show at the 600-square-foot gallery in the center hall of the building had its opening in September. Curated by Maria Elena Ferrer-Harrington, executive director of Humanamente Kingston, the open-call exhibition features works by Hudson Valley artists. It can be visited from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays and Tuesdays, by appointment on Wednesdays, and from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Fridays through Sundays. New shows will be mounted on a quarterly basis in 2021.
The 1800-square-foot dance studio can also be rented as an event space, and has already been used to host a charity auction, in addition to ongoing yoga, meditation and belly dance classes. It, along with the music studio, is acoustically insulated with sound-dampening tiles, Jacob notes.
Classes being offered in the large visual arts studio, which has plenty of natural light and a flexible floor plan, are virtual-only at this point. In time, the space will accommodate art students of all ability levels in person. It’s equipped with both standing and seated easels, for example. Similarly, one of the potters’ wheels in the ceramics studio is specially designed at an elevated level and with handheld speed controls, for use by persons in wheelchairs. As part of the building renovation, all the visual arts studios and classrooms have state-of-the-art ventilation systems to minimize respiratory exposure to potentially hazardous art materials.
The ceramics studio, opened in October, is in the Business Center wing of the building: an incubator for startups that qualify for reduced rent if they commit to hire a person with disabilities within their first 90 days of operation. Smells wafting through the corridors testify to the fact that most of the current tenants are artisanal food operations. A new café in The Arc’s growing Blackboard Bistro network, which provides vocational training for clients, is planned for the business wing as well. It’s also home to the Ulster County headquarters of Arts Mid-Hudson, a partner in many of the Cornell Creative Arts Center’s programs.
Future collaborations with other arts-related organizations that serve the Midtown community are much on the minds of the team running the new space, with an eye toward filling program gaps rather than encroaching on others’ territory. “We would like to establish an afters-school program next year,” says Jacob. “And we’re in talks with the O+ Festival. The building exterior on Ten Broeck Avenue has a stucco surface that has seen better days. We’re offering it as mural space.”
Also planned are bilingual classes and enhanced outreach to Latinx residents of the changing neighborhood.
“The arts community is associated with a lot of gatekeeping, a lot of gentrification, a lot of exclusivity,” observed the director. “Access is really a broad term. We’d like to keep our prices as low as possible, being mindful of Kingston’s demographics.” Arts Mid-Hudson members will be eligible for a scholarship program for classes.
On-street parking for the facility can be found on Bruyn Street and Ten Broeck Avenue. The entrance to the accessible parking lot in the rear is on Bruyn.
To learn more about the Cornell Creative Arts Center, sign up for a monthly newsletter or apply to teach classes there, visit https://cornellcreativeartscenter.com.
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