The latest installation to move into Empty Room is Mary Wees’ 25 Days of Building, a collaborative art project bringing together 25 artists to build a gallery in 25 days.
Empty Room began this past June as a six month long experiment by Bluestone Development, Secret Penguin, and What Cheer. Located at 13th and Webster streets (Saddle Creek Records complex) under 22 Floors the space awards a creative or innovative applicant one month’s free rent to share their idea with the Omaha community.
When Mary heard of the opportunity, she visited its website and found the submission box. After a few moments, she had her idea. “I would just bring a bunch of people in and have a lot of supplies and we’d make a lot of stuff,” she recalled. “The best thing to do with a room is really simple, and it would allow something like this to happen.” She’s created a studio to allow artists to paint, draw, write, perform music, or whatever they’d like to do.
To maintain this simplicity, she’s enforcing just one rule: once an artist begins his or her contribution, he or she will need to participate in the collaboration for the remaining days. “By collaborative, I mean it in a very very literal sense,” Mary explained. “I didn’t want the space to be just where some people made a picture and then you drew on top of it. I wanted it to be from concept to actualization.”
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Although she already has her 25 artists lined up, the public can be a part of the project, as well. Everyday, it’s open to the public from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m., and she’s planning free concerts on the 17th and 18th, with a barbeque on the second night. At the end of the 25 days, the doors will close for one day and it will be reopen as a gallery. On the project’s blog she wrote:
There will be a big fancy gallery party where everyone should come and see the works created (and buy all of them too). All purchases and donations to the space will cover the cost of the studio supplies- sort of a sustainable month of art.
Check out my interview with Mary to learn more about her background, the other artists, what she hopes to do after the project has ended, and her thoughts on Omaha’s collaborative community. John Henry Müller of What Cheer recorded a great tour of the space with Mary and posted it to Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/6505008.
