How to Build an Art Community

-Dan Thomas, RED Magazine

Walking into TRASA urban arts, you immediately get a sense of what the place is about. In fact, quit reading this article now and hightail it down there.

The vision of TRASA urban arts collective is intimately tied into the space it inhabits. Taking residence in the old Utah Pickle Company building, TRASA boasts a 14,000 square-foot facility. With two floors and plenty of outdoor space, TRASA has an art gallery, a live music venue, and space for future development like an open kitchen, technical workshops, and artist studios.

TRASA really is unique to Salt Lake City. It is an art venue, but it is more appropriately described as a collective space for artists to collaborate. Founded by local artists Kristina Robb and Brandon Garcia, TRASA urban arts collective—the non-profit community that operates the space—is dedicated to enlivening the art community with an urban-oriented medium that has been lacking in the past.

I recently visited TRASA and peeked at the preparations for the “Starving Artists” show. The large gallery was littered with spray paint and other tagging paraphernalia. To avoid the fumes, I stepped out onto the roof with Robb and Garcia, and listened to them eloquently ramble about what TRASA is.

RED magazine: What inspired TRASA? What made you feel that the community needed a place like this?

Kristina Robb: Being a modern dancer, I did not feel like there was a venue that displayed the kind of art I wanted to do. There’s a club scene and a bar scene, but there wasn’t a place to do multi-media collaborative art where you can take a risk and you can fail.

There are great venues in town already, but I think the Utah art scene suffers because there just aren’t places where artists can go and really experiment publicly and not have it work out. That is the impetus for me, to have a space where people can collaborate in the space and take risks.

RED: What is the mission of TRASA?

Robb: The basic idea is to get at social consciousness, get at social issues, get at education by means of urban art forms.

RED: What are you doing specifically to develop the educational side?

Brandon Garcia: We were approached by Granite School District to teach a class on poetry. Most of the kids that are at-risk or dropping out of school are not finding anything in traditional education that speaks to them. We’re going to do an eight-week workshop down at Granite that will culminate in a big performance event here [at TRASA].

RED: What will TRASA do on the professional side, to compliment the educational side?

Robb: We have a formal gallery, which is open-air now, but we’re going to make an addition of a climate-controlled gallery so we can do more sound installations and exhibits that deal with all the senses.

We also have a strong performance-art component to get artists to collaborate in hybrid, multi-media projects. We don’t necessarily want to be just another art venue. We’d like to work with other spaces in town to support them in what they do—and do well—and create movement back and forth between those venues and TRASA.

RED: Did you have models or inspirations of venues like this in other cities?

Garcia: I lived in San Francisco for a few years, and I worked in a multi-disciplinary art space where we did jazz, theatre, a literary series and a gallery. There are places all over the country we’ve drawn off as models, but we’ve definitely had to craft it for Salt Lake. So [TRASA] is very much a unique model.

RED: What has the response been from the establishment, whether it be the city, state or various authorities?

Robb: I would say that all around, it has been extremely supportive, even from the establishment. Although it’s been hard to tell that they are being supportive, because we freak them out. The bottom line is they don’t have laws, city ordinances and zoning rules that incorporate a multi-use model like this. Given that, we’ve had 95% extreme support and excitement, but it takes a lot of talking, a lot of politicking, and a lot of trying to establish common ground. We’ve had to help [the establishment] see that we share the same goals but our means are different.

RED: What has the response been from the local artistic community?

Robb: People seem to love coming to TRASA and we really need the local arts community to get behind us. But many local artists, in my opinion, aren’t necessarily ready to follow their dreams and inspiration to the end. They have a vision, but they’re not sure how to get there. We’re here to work with them on how to get there, but with a lot of artists—especially young ones—their model on how to achieve that vision is very small. Many people don’t know about applying for grants and really thinking into the future to get their ideas funded. So there’s a lot of teaching and mentoring before we are really established in that way.

RED: Tell me more about the “Starving Artists” exhibit that’s opening.

Garcia: Graffiti is such a unique art form. It can’t really be framed. In its usual setting, it sort of takes over a public space—this whole art form is very much a response to a visually uninteresting landscape. If you put it in a box or case like the galleries are used to seeing, it loses its essence. That’s why we’re letting artists paint directly on the walls. It’s a visual assault.