Side Street Projects

Location

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.