Tulsa Arts & Humanities Council Hardesty Arts Center
ON THE
By Holly Wall
The Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa broke ground on its Hardesty Arts Center (to be casually referred to as AHHA and pronounced “aha”), formerly called the Visual Arts Center, on May 24. The center is expected to be open in the fall of 2012. The groundbreaking follows a decade of planning and four years of fundraising and false starts. When the project was formally announced in December of 2007, AHCT planned to rehabilitate the Mathews Warehouse in downtown Tulsa’s Brady Arts District into an artist-driven arts center with gallery space, studios and classrooms. Originally, AHCT planned to open the center in the fall of 2008. Housed in the Mathews Warehouse, it would have been two stories high and 40,000 square feet, with about 9,000 of that dedicated gallery space. It would have been a place for AHCT to host its community outreach programs, such as Harwelden Institute and Artists-inthe-Schools, and it would have also hosted artists in residence, with visiting regional and national artists working with the local community to create exhibitions. Most of what would have been still will be. The primary difference between the project that was planned in 2007 — and the decade leading up to that year — and what will open in the fall of 2012 is the location. The programming, which will utilize visiting artists to interact with artists, adults and children, will remain the same. “We’re developing programming right now, but the core of it is the visiting artists,” AHHA Director Kathy McRuiz said. “One of the things that we’ve seen that is a very good model of this is where an artist comes in for an extended period of time and really
24
f e a t u re
A project nearly 15 years in the making is finally under way in downtown Tulsa. gets involved in the community and the exhibition winds up being a joint project (between the artist and the community).” AHCT had a 99-year lease with the City of Tulsa on the west half of the Mathews Warehouse. But when the powers-that-be decided to seek historic tax credits to help fund the property‘s redevelopment, the location was nixed. Requirements for the center contradicted those for the tax credits, and Selser Schaefer Architects, the local architecture firm working on the project, was forced to scrap its original plans and come up with a new design for a new building. The George Kaiser Family Foundation, which owns the east half of the Mathews Warehouse and plans to use it to house the Eugene B. Adkins collection of art, jointly owned by Philbrook Museum of Art and the University of Oklahoma’s Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Norman, funded the center’s redesign in September of 2010. Plans for the west end of the Mathews building have not yet been released. After AHCT raised the $13 million it needed to begin construction on the facility, it was ready to break ground. The Hardesty Family Foundation was the project’s primary funder and, thus, its namesake. Roughly $5 million more is still needed to outfit the space with equipment and pay for the programming.
community studio and a learning studio. “The learning and community studios are where we anticipate a lot of work done with the visiting artists will be,” McRuiz said. “We’ll be recruiting artists whose artwork is involved with the community on many levels. So they can use this space to develop their exhibitions and interact with the community as part of that exhibition. So these are pretty raw, fun spaces that can be transformed while working with the artists and with the community.” There will also be places for AHCT and other organizations to host lectures, children’s classes and activities, workshops and adult classes, especially those associated with the visiting artists. The second floor will have loft gallery space that overlooks the firstfloor gallery, a reference library stocked with computers and books, a children’s and family studio, a wood shop, and program offices, storage and conference office space for member organizations. “Member organizations are organizations that are working on getting their 501(c)3 (tax exemption status) and don’t have space of their own,” McRuiz said. “They can use the facility as their own. It’s kind of a build on what we’ve been doing for many years, only now they have a space to work in. It’s something that was needed.”
Construction is happening at the corner of Archer Street and Boston Avenue, which was the parking lot for the Mathews Warehouse. The two buildings will be separated by a sculpture garden and outdoor event space.
The third floor will house an outdoor studio and event area; 2D, 3D and 4D studios; a media lab; a photography suite; and a toxic spray room for artists using especially volatile materials. The 4D lab is intended for printmaking and surface design artists and projects.
AHHA will be four stories tall and more than 42,000 square feet. The first floor will house gallery space, administrative offices, a
“The concept behind it is to have connectivity with our media lab,” McRuiz said. “A lot of artists do their designs on computers, and