ART 180 founder Marlene Paul at the nonprofit’s West Marshall Street headquarters (Photo by Jay Paul)
ART 180, the multi-hyphenate collective — gallery, youth group, aesthetic and spiritual workshop, haven for at-risk kids — turns 20 this summer, a milestone of an anniversary that would seem to put the once-scruffy startup into the exalted category of institution.
The very notion makes founder Marlene Paul’s eyes go wide with incredulity.
Us? The establishment? she seems to say, over a soft drink one recent afternoon at Saison, as a summer downpour turns West Marshall Street white and steamy.
Paul points out that it was only five years ago that they moved into their permanent home in the Arts and Culture District, in the former Atlas baking company building. And that, for all the respect ART 180 has earned in the worlds of art and activism, it is, and probably always will be, the little organization that could.
She recalls with a laugh how she and co-founder Kathleen Lane had little idea what they were getting into when they began — and how fortunate that naivete was.
“Who would do anything if you knew what it would take?” she asks.
Paul is an intense-eyed, redheaded woman whose idealism and energy make her seem more like the 32-year-old she was when she began than the 52-year-old she is now. She is also uncommonly reflective and self-questioning, refusing to cast herself in a saintly light.
“I never pretend this wasn’t self-motivated,” she says.
It is exactly this sort of ruthless questioning, not just of herself, but of a failing and indifferent society, that led her, 20 years ago, to advocate for change in the form of an arts organization.
She and Lane, both in their early 30s, both in communications, sat down one night in the fall of 1997 at a table on the deck at Legend Brewing Co., at the time the only brewery in the city, to talk about collaborating.
It did not take long before they zeroed in on a goal: How could they serve the public in some way? They quickly decided that this hypothetical, greater-good project should have something to do with art, that art would be at the core.
Art was more than universal, it was a connector — a common language that united the scattered tribes: young and old, black and white, the disabled, the disadvantaged. And it was disappearing, and fast, from the public schools, as districts across the city, state and country decided that it was a luxury, that it could be jettisoned, that math and science and tech were more important.
More conversations ensued, and with them a path and eventually a plan: an organization that would use art to address deeply ingrained social ills.
They formed a board, essentially just a group of friends on whom they tested their various ideas and names, and spent the next six months researching the market and refining the vision.
The launch was modest. They had no home; that would come six months later, when they rented an office in a former elementary school in Fulton Hill, where they set up shop for five years before moving to an office in the Plant Zero Art Center. They existed at the time solely on the web (and barely at that, in the early days of the internet) and through outreach programs, with no real staff beyond Paul and Lane. Unwilling to commit to a project that seemed so idealistic and fanciful, they decided it was probably wise to hold on to their day jobs.
But they received a major boost, that first month, when they partnered with the Salvation Army Boys and Girls Club. The collaboration was fruitful for many reasons, not least that it introduced them to the man who would become their board president (and website designer), Charlie Connell.
Perhaps more important than that, Paul says, was the affirmation that what she and Lane had first talked about that night at Legend — a means of knitting people and institutions from one, privileged part of the city with people from a more isolated, more broken one — was not just a notion in their minds; it was a demonstrated need in the city.
They had always been confident of their mission, but now they believed.
“It was not just theory at that point,” Paul says, “not just a bunch of do-gooders thinking about this stuff. It was real.”
Through the years, that belief has been tested many times.
It was tested when Lane, after three years, picked up and moved back home to Oregon to be around family for her first pregnancy. “Traumatic,” Paul says.
It was again tested when the organization was turned down not once but twice for a grant that would enable Paul and company to have the headquarters they had long dreamed of. “Heartbreaking,” she says.
And, more recently, it has been tested by the enormous cultural upheaval occasioned by the 2016 election, and the many ways that Paul, her administrative staff and her young artists have struggled to prevent the divides from deepening.
She speaks of challenges, forbearance, enduring. The impression is of an organization that has survived more than anything else.
In some ways, Paul is an unlikely activist, given the world she grew up in.
“My father was Archie Bunker,” she tells me, speaking of the unrepentant, full-throated racist portrayed by actor Carroll O’Connor in the ’70s on the popular TV show “All in the Family.”
She describes his racism as “a part of my education … not in the sense that he tried to educate me in his own values, or that I would have embraced that information, but I was always very aware that he held these beliefs that were no different from other men of his generation in this part of the world.”
She makes no attempt to exculpate herself, simply for having grown up in that environment. “I was a product of that,” she says. “It probably gave me a heightened awareness of sensitivity,” she says, “being a white person from the background I described, going into predominantly African-American neighborhoods, wanting to respect that people who look like me contributed and contribute to the way things are and were, and made things challenging for people in this city, and other cities in the south.”
It was never enough for her simply to reject her father’s ideology, she says. The question she asked herself was, how could she take action?
In a sense, it’s the same question she asked on the patio at Legend Brewing.
Paul chats with ART 180 participant Da'Quon Stith. (Photo by Jay Paul)
She tells me she feels more comfortable, in her role at ART 180, as a white person serving a black constituency, with asking questions than with providing answers. It’s also a matter of inclination, of belief. She believes asking questions, in a variety of ways, is more fruitful than seeking easy answers.
“We exist for these young people to question what they have been given,” she says, “to not accept the answer they have been given.”
It is not at all lost on her that she oversees an organization whose primary audience (and whose staff, too) is young and black — while she herself is middle-aged and white.
She says she tries to fight the perception that she suffers from “white savior syndrome” by virtue of her “intentionality” — in other words, by acknowledging the fundamental “imbalances” at work in the organization, and by being aware of all the implications (and of every shade of nuance) in the structure.
Paul thinks a person in her position can never be complacent or self-satisfied. Can never stop questioning.
ART 180 has given the voiceless a voice, and a chance at developing those voices — making them deeper, and louder, with the chance of carrying beyond their own communities.
More important than that, it has given them a space. A space away from home, and away from the streets. A space to take refuge in.
But is it, Paul asks, enough?
In the wake of the election, she says she has struggled mightily with wanting to do more. To expand. To take in additional kids. To add other programs. To form new partnerships.
She continually has to remind herself of their mission, and that it is largely because of that tight, narrowed focus that they have been able to survive for 20 years.
It pains her, though.
To know that, as much as they have done, there is still so much more to do. That the culture is deteriorating faster than they can work.
The milestone anniversary is, thus, a bittersweet occasion — an achievement to be celebrated, but only for so long.
As we speak, I am reminded of Kobo Abe’s “Woman of the Dunes,” and the eponymous woman who spends her days scooping up buckets of sand to prevent her house from sinking — an effort that is ongoing, that cannot end, because if it does, then she does, too.
The struggle here is not nearly that fateful, but Paul is well aware that she cannot be complacent or proud.
“When you think about ART 180 and the next 20 years,” I ask her, “do you feel hopeful?”
“I don’t know,” Paul says.
She thinks for a moment, retreating inward, her optimism and faith duking it out with her pessimism and despair.
Finally, she looks at me, nods and says, “Knowing we exist gives me hope.”
ART 180 will host a special 20th-anniversary art show on Friday, Aug. 3, from 6 to 9 p.m. at 114 W. Marshall St. during RVA First Fridays. The reception is family-friendly and open to the public, and all artwork in the show is available for sale to support the organization’s mission.
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