Art project cash targeted on Abingdon incubator

BRISTOL HERALD COURIER

ABINGDON, Va. – The artisans’ courtyard project planned by William King Museum has taken on new life since the announcement that the museum’s Academy Drive campus is up for sale.

The project was initially conceived as a piece of a larger campus renovation plan, a roughly $1.3 million structure separate from the museum that would house working artisan studios. The $310,000 it was awarded from the Appalachian Regional Commission and Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development has now become the seed money for a different but very much related concept: an arts business incubator.

“We’re going to do the same thing only better,” said Jim Cowart, economic development director for the town. “It’s going to be a more comprehensive program, and we had to go through several steps, and we just processed a memorandum between the town and William King for them to help us secure that funding.”

In that document, the museum agrees to collaborate with the town on the project, the transfer of the funding and the mission of providing business-focused opportunities for artisans. The town, which will own the incubator, agrees to set up an executive board, made up primarily of members of the arts community.

Marcy Miller, executive director of the museum, did not immediately return calls seeking comment Friday.

The museum board voted in July to sell its property, find a new location from which to raise money and, ultimately, build a new museum that’s closer to the heart of town and closely tied with other downtown arts venues. With a plan announced to close the doors of the current facility this spring, the board abandoned its renovation and construction plans on that site.

Independent of the William King project, the idea of an arts incubator has been floating around town for a couple of years, particularly with the development of Heartwood, a $16.5 million facility under construction as an artisan-focused regional tourism hub.

Cowart said the town is considering three sites for the incubator, two off of East Main Street near other arts-related venues and one on Park Street, in the town’s designated arts district on the site of the old county jail.

“I think the leading candidate is the jail,” Cowart said, adding that other options are still being considered though not discussed publicly.

He said the town is seeking $300,000 from the Virginia Tobacco Commission for the project and another $25,000 from DHCD and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. When it’s said and done, Cowart said, the incubator will be close to a $1 million facility.

“Of course we’ll be applying for more grants in the future," he said.

Cowart said the incubator will be something like the one in Galax, which is called Chestnut Creek School of the Arts and offers classes in a refurbished old bank building.

“It’s going to be an attractive building that will have resident artist instructors, that will have student classes,” Cowart said. “The main difference between what we’re looking at and what other arts incubators are: We are going to have business classes, train the artists that come through here in how to manage their own small business, as well as how to do different types of art.”

He said the doors will open sometime in the next two years.

Todd Christensen, executive director of the Southwest Virginia Cultural Heritage Commission, which is overseeing Heartwood, said that attraction at Exit 14 will work in conjunction with the arts incubator.

“We were not going to have working artisans on site as some artisan centers do,” he said, “but we wanted to be able to have them somewhere that people could go if they’re interested in things being made.”

He said the idea is that when visitors want to see studios, Heartwood can send them down Main Street in Abingdon to the incubator, where they might be able to watch a blacksmith or a glass blower at work, helping the town and its arts community as well as the regional arts venue.

Christensen said he sees it as a way to fuel the region’s creative economy by providing a place where artisans and those training as apprentices can work. At the same time, he said, it will provide Heartwood with an ongoing source for locally made items that are in demand, helping to connect those artisans with a market for their work.

Cowart said Heartwood and its associated venues will bring “a renaissance of the Abingdon arts on a large scale.” That, he said, means tourists – and a host of economic benefits to the town as the regional tourism experiment of Heartwood takes off.

dmccown@bristolnews.com

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