General Info:
Founded in 1992 by Karen Atkinson and Joe Luttrell, Side Street Projects is a completely-mobile, artist-run nonprofit organization. Our mission is to give artists of all ages the ability and the means to support their creative endeavors. We teach artists how to roll up their sleeves and do things themselves with education programs that encourage self-reliance and creative problem solving in a contemporary art context. Side Street Projects is part of a growing alternative practice of artists who operate outside the gallery system by working inside communities. We engage in complex public negotiations rather than object making. The artists who run Side Street Projects are alumni of CalArts and RISD who approach the organization as both social enterprise and meta-public art, drawing inspiration from artists like Rick Lowe and Mel Chin, and collaborative teams like Fallen Fruit or ARK. Colleagues have referred to our mobile art center as a sustained happening that is family-friendly, fun, yet still manages to be a conceptually rigorous contribution to contemporary art practice. We like to think of Side Street Projects as a functional piece of conceptual public art. Our Alternate Routes program integrates art, math, and science in a 100% hands-on environment' mobile wood shops aboard renovated transit buses where kids learn about art, design, and engineering using only hand tools, raw materials, and their imagination. Our trained instructors are young, professional artists from such institutions as RISD, UCLA, CalArts, and Vassar. Our curriculum is vetted and endorsed by the LA County Arts Commission's Arts for All initiative' recognizing Alternate Routes as an exceptionally innovative, standards-compliant education program for ages 5-11, appropriate for core-curriculum integration during the school day as well as after-school. In June of 2009, Side Street Projects embarked on an exciting 6, 500 mile cross-country road trip from Pasadena, to Boston, and back to retrieve The Armadillo ' an actual FEMA trailer deployed after Hurricane Katrina that MIT students and faculty transformed into a vertical ( and mobile ) community garden. MIT awarded The Armadillo to Side Street Projects after a nation-wide search. A highly-anticipated companion for our beloved Woodworking Buses, The Armadillo is the newest addition to the Alternate Routes fleet of mobile art education classrooms for kids in Pasadena and throughout LA County. Mobile Artist Services Each year, we provide vital career-support services to over 2, 000 contemporary visual artists throughout LA County. Services include Career-Survival Workshops, a Best-Professional Practices Podcast Series, and an Equipment Co-Op that puts cost prohibitive technology into the hands of low-income artists. In just the past 2 years, our program alumni have won $18, 000 in grants, been accepted into prestigious MFA programs, secured representation at major galleries, and founded their own nonprofit exhibition venues. Because affordable space is a challenging obstacle for 80% of America's non-profits, Side Street Projects became a completely mobile, self-sustaining organization in 2008' much like a M * A * S * H unit. Our offices are a pair of restored vintage travel trailers, our communication systems are 100% wireless, and the whole operation runs on a mobile solar energy array. In partnership with the City of Pasadena, we will remain permanently mobile' transforming blighted, transitional spaces throughout Northwest Pasadena into something that blurs the line between public art and public service. Side Street would like to thank the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Nathan Green Foundation, the Pasadena Art Alliance, Pasadena Art League, the Pasadena Community Foundation, Pasadena Dept. of Cultural Affairs, STOCK Building Supply, Tournament of Roses Foundation, and all of our individual donors for their generous support. We couldn't do it without