PhoTo/eric marks
PERMAnEnt REsidEnCE
holland Project director Britt curtis and workshop coordinator sierra norton jickling stand by hasler r. gomez's installation The university of the Waves.
The holl and ProjecT, reno’s all-ages arTs nonProfiT, found a home BY josie luciano
14 | RN&R |
DECEMBER 3, 2015
R
ight now, there’s a large, plastic sailboat suspended from the ceiling at the Holland Project. It’s the kind of plastic that’s clear enough to see through to the other side, but not clear enough to tell what’s there. Poems hang on the walls, wrapped with the same milky film that skins the boat. Everything looks like it was caught halfway through the act of disappearing. The exhibit—a debut from University of Nevada, Reno
Bachelor of Fine Arts student Häsler R. Gómez titled The University of the Waves—is bound up in hazy metaphor and personal symbolism, the kind you see everywhere you look, the kind that makes you believe you’re in charge of your own ship. It’s a message that means something to Holland’s target audience—a combination of teens, young adults and justadults who relate to the feelings of wonder, insecurity and empowerment that come with the
passage of growing up. But the metaphor extends to Holland itself, an organization that has navigated its share of uncertain waters. From completely volunteerrun beginnings to a string of temporary residences that have included a giant warehouse, garages, restaurants, schools, the university, and a tiny duplex on Cheney Street, you could say that Holland has been in flux for awhile now. That’s why it was particularly hard when—due to the effects of gentrification—Holland found
out that its rent was set to double on the Vesta Street building they have called home for the last four years. It was an increase that would “effectively price us out of the game,” according to co-founder and director Britt Curtis. “Organizations like this don’t tend to make it past the … 10-year mark if they don’t own their building,” said board president Clint Neuerburg, in a recent phone interview. “Being someone who had been around since the beginning and seeing how hard a toll it had taken on the organization to move as many times as we had, I wasn’t confident that the organization could survive another move. We’d been nomadic for so long.” The property cost $600,000, a figure that was 20 times any amount Holland had ever raised in the past. But after a handful of major investors, including funders like the Redfield and Kaiser Foundations, came in with 90 percent of the goal, Holland rallied the general public to raise the last $60,000 in a social media-driven campaign called “Grounded For Life” that lasted only two months. It’s an impressive effort for any organization, but given the 100-plus partnerships that Holland has been part of in its lifetime, it’s hardly surprising that the community would show up in droves when the nonprofit needed a permanent home. “All we knew then and all we know now is that we only exist if we exist with our community,” said Curtis. “We never wanted to recreate the wheel, we don’t want to do things that people are already doing. We wanted to fill some voids, and then we wanted to support the cool things that were already happening.”
Bu i ldi ng tRust Though the purchase of the building gives Holland the kind of staying power you can buy, it doesn’t mean that the organization is going to change overnight, or at all. “I don’t think the Holland Project needs to grow and become
