nothin Artspace Visionary Comes Home | New Haven Independent

Artspace Visionary Comes Home

Paul Bass Photo

Steve Jobs pulled it off. Will Helen Kauder?

Kauder is returning to a cutting-edge organization she built from scratch, then left, after changing the way people think about and participate in art.

Steve Jobs did that with the organization he co-founded and spent years creating, Apple computers. He left the company in 1985, then returned in 1996 and managed to inject a renewed spirit of experimentation and industry-changing innovation.

Think iPod, iTunes, iPhone…

Here in New Haven, Helen Kauder cofounded and then spent years developing a not-for-profit called Artspace. It eventually moved into its own gallery space at Crown and Orange, in the center of the revived Ninth Square. But from the start the organization was more about bringing people from different walks of life together to create art in new ways and in usual places. (And have a lot of fun in the process.)

Think City-Wide Open Studios,” the now-annual fall event in which dozens of local artists invite the public into their work spaces all over town on the same weekend.

Think Backpack Project” — when in 2002, after schools across the country decreed that students must use clear backpacks in the wake of the Columbine shootings, Kauder arranged for 200 New Haven students and adults to create (and exhibit) works from donated clear backpacks. In other projects, Kauder sent artists into factories and into hotels to produce original pieces.

Think exploding arena — when Artspace stayed open all night in the hours leading to the January 2007 early-morning explosion/ demolition of the New Haven Coliseum. People gathered in Artspace a block away to reminisce about their favorite Coliseum memories, while a show called Don’t Know Much About History” (also in its last hours) hung on the walls as a backdrop.

Kauder resigned as Artspace director later that year to commute to a new job as deputy director of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield. As when a founding director leaves any young organization, people wondered if Artspace would retain its mojo in the transition. And, Steve Jobs and Starbucks’ Howard Schultz aside, few expected to see Kauder return to the helm.

But on July 1 she will. And she’s geared up to resume her original mission of finding new spaces for art to happen” in New Haven, she said in an interview at the gallery Tuesday.

Kauder, who’s 49 and lives in the East Rock neighborhood, said she feels energized to return, and pleased not to be commuting an hour each way to work.

It feels fresh,” she said. Artspace is an amazing platform on which to do creative projects that are great for New Haven, great for artists, great for the community.”

She returns to an organization that, like the world around it, evolved in the past three years. It’s on Facebook now. The Facebook page has 2,664 fans, more than any other community arts organization in the region, according to Kauder.

While she was gone, Artspace also became home to a monthly Underground” indie music gathering that brought a young crowd into the joint.

Needless to say, those developments, as well as projects she has encountered elsewhere since leaving Artspace in 2007, have Kauder brimming with new ideas.

She hopes to build on the Underground series, for instance, by creating a library on Artspace’s website of downloadable recordings by participating bands.

She’s organizing a Draw On!” event modeled on a similar annual project of the Aldrich Museum (and the UK’s Big Draw”). It works like the Big Read,” in which a community reads the same book, discusses it, and organizes community events around it. Artspace will have different groups around town working with artists on murals, paper drawings, and other related events.

Meanwhile, Kauder’s been reading up on colony collapse disorder” plaguing bees. She plans to commission artists to do bee-themed works as part of a larger sustainability project starting in May 2011. The project will also group artists with farmers markets to create new works, and tie in to a state conference taking place in town about reusing building materials.

Kauder also hopes to involve Artspace in another evolving community arts development three blocks west on Crown Street, at the new Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School. Kauder has spent the school year organizing collaborations there between working artists and students; some of the results will be displayed beginning this weekend in a storefront across the street from the school (in the former Cooper’s dress shop).

Kauder’s most immediate project at Artspace involves rekindling some of the energy around Open Studios.” In addition to the weekend tours of individual artist studios, Kauder plans to revive a feature that disappeared after she left: finding an unconventional, underused, funky non-arts building to house one weekend’s worth of exhibits by hundreds the artists who don’t have home/studio spaces to share.

The events were classic Kauder — celebratory community happenings that felt fresh, bringing artists and art-lovers into neighborhood places many had never ventured into before. The re-imagined spaces themselves become integral parts of the exhibit. In the past Kauder held the events in the unused Science Park space, in the old Pirelli building, the former Smoothie factory, and a reclaimed former Olin testing facility on Shelton Avenue. She has her eye out for a new diamond in the rough for this October’s event.

Sometimes some of the best new ideas can come from updating old ideas in new packages. Like free wireless with a Starbucks Frappuccino.

Kauder (at left) on the public bench outside Artspace, where Randy Harris (at right) takes a break from his porter job at the Ninth Square Residences across the street.

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