DESCRIBING ELSEWHERE ARTISTS

This week we spoke with George from Elsewhere Artists Collaborative, who launched the Open Call for Residencies in Greensboro, NC:

Let us know a little about how Elsewhere Artists Collaborative started...
"In 1937, Joe and Sylvia Gray moved from Mount Airy NC, and started a furniture business at 607 South Elm Street in downtown Greensboro. Realizing that trucks full of new North Carolina furniture were going to New York and then returning empty, the Grays began buying repossessed depression surplus, namely furniture, in New York and shipping it back to Greensboro for repair and sale. Following WWII, the store morphed into a surplus business and catalog sales company, Carolina Sales Co. The accumulation amassed over the company’s lifetime remained in a mountains of things, boarded up after her death in 1997.
Inspired by the potential for these "found objects" as artistic resource, I (George Scheer, Sylvia’s grandson) recruited fellow artists and friends to begin excavating Sylvia’s old store in May 2003. Elsewhere became a 501©3 non-profit organization in 2004, and thanks to a first lucky grant from Greensboro’s United Arts Council, some chance movie shoots, a lite-brite commission, and then an active, incessant, absolute fury of unpaid work and resourceful transformation, we made it to the five year mark, which seemed to be a temporal launching point for solid longevity through state and national grants enabling our current sustainable growth."

You call yourself "a living museum and experimental production environment in downtown Greensboro, NC". What do you mean by "museum" in this case? Please elaborate.
"Elsewhere’s living museum reimagines a former thrift store as a site for ongoing collaborative productions and creative explorations. Visitors encounter a 58-year collection of thrift and surplus amassed largely by one woman, Sylvia Gray, during her tenure of a series of businesses at the location from 1939-1997. That collection has been transformed by hundreds of creators. Now, the living museum presents a moment in the process of activating a circulating and transforming the collection through interactive artworks, object arrangements, process displays, and project presentations."

Also, I’m sure many of our users don’t know much about Greensboro, NC. Enlighten us please :-)
"Thanks for asking, gso is a funny home to us all that we never expected to be living in, it is a wonderful place in a transitive point in its city-lifecycle, and residents tend to find a welcoming and enchanting setting."

And in connection with this, what is the story behind the residency?
"Elsewhere residencies invite creatives of all kinds to experiment with context, process, and collaboration within a three-story former thrift store turned living museum. Residents endlessly compose and re-imagine Elsewhere’s environment through creative and critical projects by using the immense at-hand resources from the 58-year inventory as both material and inspiration for site-specific investigations."

How do you run it on a day-to-day basis? How do you fund it?
"As a non-profit, we like being accountable to the public for the art that we make and the cultural services we provide. We raise our basic operating costs through museum admissions, memberships, event admissions, private donations, fundraisers, tours, educational programs, and services. Our programming costs are covered through grants and special projects, commissions, private and public contributions, fees, and private initiatives. We have cheap rent thanks to the Grey family. We keep our costs really low and hundreds upon hundreds of people give their time and talent without a speck of financial reward."

What is your vision with the residency?
"Elsewhere is an ongoing, unfolding story of life as an art form. We remain open to being visible, being read, considered, interpreted, imbued with meanings we didn’t intend. We see ideas through their enactivity. We are all collaborating on curating this process, wherein we follow tributaries, trajectories, caverns, methods, experiments, that express our wonder and agency in an ongoing unfolding of this story of making something becoming."

Click here to learn more and apply to take part in the project.