Patrons at an April opening for Alaura Seidl’s multimedia exhibit “Toast” at Arts + Literature Lab.
At the Arts + Literature Laboratory, last night’s art show swiftly becomes the backdrop for tomorrow night’s reading series and next week’s concert.
For these reasons and more, Rita Mae Reese and Jolynne Roorda founded Arts + Literature Laboratory (ALL). The experimental, collaborative space opened in January and has since been packed to the gills with people attending multimedia exhibitions, theater and musical performances.
The nonprofit was recently awarded two local grants to further its mission: $2,885 from the Madison Arts Commission to fund ALL’s Professional Development Series for Writers, which includes monthly craft talks and write-ins, and a $960 grant from Dane Arts to help support a series of exhibitions by emerging Dane County artists and related professional development programs for visual artists.
The 1,000-square-foot gallery at 2021 Winnebago St. has an urban, industrial feel; exposed gray brick walls and aging wooden rafters are juxtaposed with matte gallery walls and track lighting. The current works on display by Connecticut artist Caryn Azoff have a mosaic effect, featuring angular shapes in turquoise, tangerine and goldenrod on wood. Azoff says the work represents the association of memory through color on the space of the canvas. When the ALL hosts events, the gallery pieces act as an inspiring backdrop for other artists.
In preparing for her exhibit, Azoff says the gallery’s many purposes were a top consideration. “We did a lot of editing and thinking about the space in terms of the various uses of ALL,” Azoff says. “I like the different audiences — music, literary and arts — that visit the space.”
“We were all so shocked that Madison didn’t have a place like this,” adds Reese, a UW-Madison MFA grad and poetry and fiction author who published her most recent work, The Book of Hulga, in March. As a leader in the local Watershed Reading Series, she and Roorda met through mutual friends in the arts community. The two started talking and realized they shared the dream of a collaborative, welcoming space for artists.
Roorda, a graphic artist with a background in community arts administration, already had experience creating such a space. She opened Arts + Literature Laboratory with poet Dianne Bilyak and Azoff in New Haven, Conn., in 2003..
“Since our [Madison] opening, we’ve been flying,” says Roorda. In fact, ALL has something happening nearly every night. It facilitates events for the ArtWrite Collective, the Watershed Reading Series and Monsters of Poetry. In addition, it has hosted lectures by professional writers, workshops on food and memoir writing and concerts in partnership with Tone Madison, a local arts and culture website. Write-ins, held the first Wednesday of each month, invite writers to build a cohort in the traditionally solitary practice.
And the gallery is willing to showcase art that might not find a home in more traditional spaces such as public galleries and coffee shops.
UW-Madison Art Department lecturer Alaura Seidl’s exhibition “Toast” occupied the ALL space for much of April. Focused on the queer experience and Seidl’s discovery of sexuality and gender identity, the show re-created Seidl’s apartment, down to the furniture, and included video and audio clips of provocative anti-gay slurs alongside positive affirmations.
“There’s absolutely no way I would have been able to pull off that show had they not been so open to a social and relational piece,” Seidl says. “A lot of places will lean toward censorship.”
The space seems to be filling a need in the Madison community for an interdisciplinary space.
“Outside of the university, there is not really a place for artists of multiple disciplines to come together and create meaningful connections,” says Max Puchalsky, a board member and sound design artist.
With the recently acquired grant money, ALL will be able to pay speakers, increase marketing efforts and double its footprint by renting more space adjacent to the current one. There, they’ll offer a designated space for writers, an expansion of ALL’s small press library and a curated collection of prints from Wisconsin artists.
“We hope that this can be a community center where writers just want to drop in and work together and be social together. Hopefully that will lead to collaborations and cross-pollination,” Roorda says.
ALL offers memberships for artists, would-be artists and patrons of the arts. For more information, see facebook.com/ArtLitLab.
Editor's Note: This story was corrected on July 7 to note that Arts + Literature Lab received a $2,885 grant from the Madison Arts Commission, that the current square footage of the space is 1,000 square feet and that the co-founders of ALL in New Haven also included poet Dianne Bilyak.
