Allison Lenz / M.O.D. Media Prod
The Board of Directors (left to right) breaks ground: Phil Redman, Jenny Pressman, Rita Mae Reese, Donna Carnes (emeritus), Max Puchalsky, Genia Daniels, and Jolynne Roorda. Not pictured: Mrill Ingram.
Since it opened its doors in a small, nondescript brick building on Winnebago Street in 2016, Arts + Literature Laboratory (ALL) has been bursting at the seams. In April, the creative hub will begin a move into a new space at the corner of East Main and South Livingston Streets, attached to the city parking complex near The Sylvee.
Its capacity will swell to 10,000 square feet — 20 times larger than the current space.
At a groundbreaking celebration in November, ALL supporters were invited to share their “wishes, hopes & dreams” for the interdisciplinary space on a mammoth rectangle of paper hung from a grey brick wall. Attendees filled it with intentions like: “Help grow the creative economy in Madison,” “Offer classes to 100s of kids for free,” and “Continue to inspire artists of all ages.”
A $500,000 grant from the city of Madison provides approximately half the cost of the massive buildout, just across the street from StartingBlock, Madison’s burgeoning tech and entrepreneurial center. ALL’s new home is an important symbol for the arts in Madison, says Jolynne Roorda, ALL’s visual and performing arts director.
“We’re showing that the community supports the arts and the city believes in this investment in our local arts scene,” she says. ALL also signed a long-term lease with the city, which owns the building, with a 20-year initial term and four five-year renewals for up to 40 years.
It’s quite a jump from 2016, when Roorda founded ALL with poet and author Rita Mae Reese, whose “Watershed” reading series was folded into the new nonprofit. ALL has become a hotbed for accessible, inclusive arts activities in Madison. Its exhibits and performances from new artists are often on the fringes of what galleries and museums might show. In hosting programs, workshops, classes, concerts and poetry readings, ALL has provided a space for artists across all mediums to display and perform their work — and to be compensated for it. In 2018 and 2019, 50 percent of the organization’s budget went to artists, musicians, writers and teaching artists.
“A lot of our growth has come with bringing together people and ideas and finding out that by working together, we can be more successful,” Roorda says.
The organization has partnered with — and often lent its modest space to — groups from the Madison schools, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Greater Madison Jazz Consortium and Briarpatch Youth Services. The current facility has served as a nesting doll for the arts, often hosting independent film screenings, local and touring performers and poetry and prose readings inside a space concurrently occupied by art exhibits. Spearheaded by education and outreach director Alaura Borealis, whose ArtWrite Collective was absorbed into ALL, the nonprofit also offers youth arts education, as well as a queer youth book club and such classes as screen printing and screenwriting.
The varied projects that ALL supports promote a better world by welcoming different perspectives, says Yogesh Chawla, a Dane County supervisor and member of the Dane Arts Commission. “[The interdisciplinary space] has elevated not only the art, but also the discourse in our community,” Chawla says.
Building on its mission of creating a sustainable arts ecosystem in Madison, the nonprofit’s new space will open up more possibilities for education, exhibition and creation to intermingle.
To support local artists, the location’s third floor will contain four studios at affordable rents, alongside all-ages education studios, offering the community exposure to art as a career. The ground floor will be filled by a pair of 1,000-plus-foot galleries — one dedicated to performances — and an office and reception area. The mezzanine will house a library and writing center.
“We are staking this claim for community-driven arts in this gentrifying neighborhood,” Roorda says. Artists are being priced out of studio spaces in Madison, which lacks the historical industrial infrastructure that’s often converted to arts use in bigger cities. Madison artists sometimes relocate to Minneapolis or Chicago because it is so difficult to build sustainable careers here, she says. To keep the arts thriving in Madison, more value — the kind that pays the rent — must be placed directly on art, Roorda says.
“People sort of take it for granted that there’s economic value [art is] giving to their lives that we don’t always pay for. We just benefit from it every day. Without being too preachy about it, we want people to value the work of art,” she says.
The city’s shifting arts scene was prioritized in its 2013 Cultural Plan, a five-year roadmap for driving arts and innovation in the city.
“While the [Madison] gallery market is shrinking, it’s really important to still have places where artists can exhibit their work and where audiences can experience this new work. ALL really filled that gap when they moved in,” says Karin Wolf, arts program administrator for the city of Madison.
“This is meant to be a very open community-based space where people feel comfortable and everybody feels welcome,” says Roorda. “We want everyone to feel that what they bring to the table belongs there.”
[Editor's note: The first name of Jolynne Roorda was corrected. We also adjusted a number to reflect the fact that ALL's capacity will be 20 times larger than the current space; the original space was 500 square feet, not 1,000.]
