It’s not often that a soap factory slated for demolition can be bought for one dollar and converted into a cutting-edge art space. Yet that’s exactly how Minneapolis’ most comprehensive contemporary art space — appropriately named The Soap Factory — came to be.
The organization began in 1988 and was initially called No Name Exhibitions by the group of artists that founded it in order to emphasize creating innovative art that wasn’t being shown in Minneapolis’ more conventional art establishments. “There were not many independent, scrappy, non-institutionalized art venues. There was the Walker Art Center. There was the Minneapolis Art Institute,” says Katherine Rochester, the Soap Factory’s Program Manager. “But The Soap Factory was committed to the fact that they called themselves ‘no name’ because they were interested in having a different kind of artist for a different kind of space.”
No Name Exhibitions changed its name to The Soap Factory when it acquired the current 48,000-square-foot space in 1991. Instead of renovating the space from the ground up, the founders opted to emphasize the warehouse’s unique, industrial structure. Over the past two decades, the organization has grown from an unknown start-up into one of the most well-respected contemporary arts organizations in Minnesota.
“It is by far the largest space dedicated to contemporary art practice in Minnesota and the Midwest for emerging artists, and it is an incredibly raw space,” Rochester says. “We do almost exclusively site-specific work because that is what is most successful here.”
The Soap Factory’s support of the arts community is two-fold. Local artists have the opportunity to volunteer and assist with setting up exhibitions. If they volunteer for a certain number of hours per month, they are allowed to utilize free, year-round studio space. “That is a huge bonus and, of course, the most essential way that one can support an artist — by giving them the space to do their work,” Rochester says.
For artists whose work is exhibited, The Soap Factory provides them with the resources necessary to create pieces that are completely unique and customized to the space. “We look for artists that make site-specific work that works with the building or takes the building into account in some way…it’s not a bland, blank slate where you are showing your work,” Rochester says. “Basically, we tend not to go into an artist’s studio, choose some objects, and say, ‘Okay, this is what we want in the show.’ We want the artist to do what they’re most interested in doing. Whatever it may be, we support them financially, with volunteers and with manpower and let them have free reign in The Soap Factory.”
The Soap Factory has expanded into showcasing performance art as well. From July 29 through August 1, they will be hosted Artery 2010, which featured 18 performance artists. “If you think that it’s hard to get a venue as a visual artist, it’s basically impossible to find a venue as a performance artist,” Rochester says. Also, from August 1 through August 28, the space will be collaborating with Minneapolis-based publishing house Hot Off The… to allow anyone to submit up to 25 pages of manuscript for editing and publication.
The organization’s administration is in the process of obtaining landmark status and has also taken on fund-raising endeavors in order to begin refurbishing the space while still maintaining many of the original qualities that make the building unique. “Only in the past six years or so has the organization had the full-time staff who could put in the time and fund-raising time that it takes to build up the resources needed; we’re talking millions of dollars to refurbish a 48,000-square-foot space that basically doesn’t have anything in it,” Rochester says.
In the past 20 years, The Soap Factory’s reputation has grown well beyond Minnesota’s borders as the space has garnered attention from the national and international art community. “We do have a commitment to local artists, and in the beginning, it was all local artists,” Rochester says. “Now we have national and international artists, and I would say that they are evenly split between the two. At least 75 percent of the artists that we show, whether they are from Minneapolis or not, have heard of the Factory through a friend artist who has shown here or has heard about a really good experience at The Soap Factory. I think that our reputation grows with the more people that pass through our doors.”