Katie Fanuko

League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots: Mechanized Performers

Founded in 2000 by Eric Singer, LEMUR is a collection of robots designed to play virtually any instrument in any style imaginable. Though the mechanical musicians may elicit skepticism and raised eyebrows, Singer’s bots have worked with acclaimed musicians such as Pat Metheny, JG Thirlwell, Morton Subotnick, and others.

Gallery Spotlight: The Wood Street Galleries

Directly above Pittsburgh’s T-Line Station, at the intersection of Wood Street and Liberty Street, is the Wood Street Galleries, one of downtown Pittsburgh’s prized cultural spaces for technology-based art. Since 2000, the organization has exclusively featured work by media artists and has elevated Pittsburgh’s emerging tech-inspired DIY scene into the fine-art realm.

“I would say what sets [us] apart internationally is that we solely focus on new-media artwork,” says Murray Horne, curator for the Wood Street Gallery. “I think that in North America, we are the gallery that focuses on that more than anybody else.”

Gallery Spotlight: The Soap Factory

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.”

Gallery Spotlight: The Project Lodge

Madison, Wisconsin may be better known for academics and politics, but just under the surface, a growing art scene is becoming more prevalent in Wisconsin’s capital. The Project Lodge is one of the organizations at the forefront of the city’s creative movement.

Since 2008, The Project Lodge has provided an intersection for local musicians and artists through their combined performance space and gallery. “One of the main goals is to be able to foster creativity for the local community,” Tyler Mackie, The Project Lodge’s gallery manager, says. Christopher Buckingham and Kendra Larson originally founded the space two years ago and have since transferred the space’s management to Andrew Berry, Hayley Powers Thornton Kennedy, Bessie Cherry, and Tyler Mackie.

Gallery Spotlight: The Post Family

Rod Hunting, Davey Sommers, Chad Kouri, Scott Thomas, Alex Fuller, Sam Rosen, and David Sieren are all brothers — yet their family is not unified by blood, but instead by kindred creative thread.

The seven initially met through school, work, and mutual friends, and it was their combined interest in design and their need to find a space to create that solidified their bond. This led them to start The Post Family collaborative, which set up shop at 1821 W. Hubbard St. in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood in 2007.

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Gallery Spotlight: Ad Hoc Art Gallery

Since 2005, the co-founder of Peripheral Media Projects and Ad Hoc Art Gallery has brought lowbrow art, street culture, and social activism to the Brooklyn masses through his gallery space, design studio, and community art collaborations.

Gallery Spotlight: Vox Populi

Installation view, Nick Paparone, Bacchanal-tootsie Roll Whip (2008). Photo credit: Stefan Abrams.

When it comes to cities known for experimental art scenes, Philadelphia might not be the first to come to mind. Yet over the past few years, the city’s tight-knit art community and DIY ethos have been attracting more and more artists to consider relocating.

Gallery Spotlight: Second Bedroom

Second Bedroom is exactly what you think it is: a tiny spare bedroom in the back of a fourth-floor apartment building at 3216 S. Morgan St. in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. But it’s the installation-art “gallery” inside the spare room that makes the trek up four flights of stairs (and, if you’re like me, a detour through a neighbor’s apartment) totally worth it.

Gallery Spotlight: Gallery 16

When Griff Williams started Gallery 16 in 1993 in San Francisco, a city known for having the most non-profit art organizations per capita, he knew that he had to create a space that would stand out.

“I really wanted to connect myself with the arts community in San Francisco, which has always been really vibrant,” Williams says. “We came upon the idea of kind of creating a new sort of model for art support — one that really didn’t require me to become a non-profit art space, which I thought was a model that was kind of on the way out.”