Steven Potter
Atkinson: 'Every generation has its art movement. This is ours.'
Graffiti writers and street artists may soon find themselves practicing their art in an unlikely place.
After Momentum Art Tech, an art supply store on Cottage Grove Road specializing in high-end spray paints, sketch books and markers, closed last January due to the pandemic and disagreements with the landlord, owner/artist Margot Atkinson went hunting for a new spot for her store.
She wanted plenty of room for not only an art store, but also a gallery, studio, workshop and event space. Atkinson found it in an old schoolhouse at the corner of Hoepker and Portage Roads, about three and a half miles north of East Towne and two miles west of Costco — in a little patch of surviving countryside.
“It’s away from everything. We’re not going to be bothering anyone and it’s private property so nobody’s going to call the police or get upset. It gives us room to breathe,” says Atkinson, who started as an employee at Momentum and then went from part owner to full owner. Her neighbors are now a few farms, a golf driving range and a small ranch. “It’s going to be a destination where people can come to see some beautiful street art in the middle of the country.” Atkinson describes the new spot as an “imagination playground.”
Atkinson is rebranding the business as the Pumpkin Hollow Art Center after the Pumpkin Hollow school that originally occupied the space. Since 1990, it housed Kris’ Custom Sewing.
In addition to special paint and other supplies, the art center will showcase a rotating selection of work — paintings, sculptures “and whatever else people want to show and sell,” she says. She’s also collecting outdated media, televisions and huge fish tanks as decoration, “and we’ll be selling vintage clothing as well.”
She has two classroom-sized purple rooms that will serve as the art supply store, clothing shop and gallery. There’s more space in the basement that she wants to convert into studio space.
Behind the main school building, there’s an enormous and partially temperature-controlled pole barn where Atkinson hopes to hold family-friendly, art-inspired events with music and also street art-focused classes.
Atkinson, who’s been an artist nearly her whole life, first picked up spray can art and muraling a couple of years ago. “This isn’t something you can sign up for at your local college. We want to teach people the steps to creating a mural and also give them the space to do it,” she says. Painting an intricate, stylized, colorful word or phrase that’s several feet tall and wide on a wall isn’t as easy as buying a canvas and painting on it. “It’s hard to get permission to paint a wall and then it takes a really long time to paint — the whole process can be daunting.”
Over the past couple of years, Atkinson and James Gubbins, who started the Cottage Grove Road Momentum Art Tech location, convinced a few dozen shop owners on the east side of Madison and in Monona to host murals. Each mural took hours and several cans of spray paint as well as imagination, experience and skill (known in the aerosol world as “can control”).
Looking at some of these murals on so-called “permission walls” shows why there are specialty paints for such work. The spray paints Atkinson sells include the 94 and Hardcore product line from Montana Colors as well as the Kobra brand. These paints are designed specifically to adhere to walls, dry quickly and not drip. They range from regular to large cans and cost between $6-$12 each. They come in wildly vibrant colors.
Atkinson rejects the notion that the store promotes illegal behavior like tagging and street artists painting on walls they don’t have permission for. She says that all art grows from initially being misunderstood. “Every generation has its art movement,” she explains. “This is ours.”
Street art and graffiti, which began in the 1960s and ’70s in New York City and has spread around the globe, is considered high art, she says, and such pieces can now be found in expensive art galleries.
But more than that, this art can change drab cityscapes for the better. “Street art was once thought to destroy cities but now, it’s being used to beautify otherwise pretty dingy places,” she says. “Think about taking a walk and going underneath a pedestrian bridge and you see big beautiful murals — that’s way better than just dirty concrete.”
Atkinson hopes to open fully by the end of November or early December. She’s currently meeting with artists and selling art supplies by appointment. In the meantime she’ll be documenting progress on the Pumpkin Hollow Art Center, 3956 Hoepker Road, through the Instagram page @pumpkinhollowartcenter.
