Recognition: Restoration of Mill

Forum planners work to put city on arts map
Proposed restoration of old hosiery mill would create Southside ‘gallery-arts ’ site
By Jan Galletta Staff Writer

At 46, Brian Tune is a Chattanooga architect who said he aims to make his city a home where the art is.

He and his longtime sculptor friend, John Henry, have teamed on a plan to transform a 92-year-old textile factory on Main Street into a cluster of rented spaces where artists live, work, perform and market their wares.

Once housing the Nations Hosiery Mill, the 55,000-square-foot site on the Southside is near Montague Park and bisected by train tracks, he said. Details for the restoration haven’t been finalized, according to Mr. Tune.

"We envision not a gallery-arts area for visual artists alone but an area that embraces all the arts," he said. "It (the old factory’s location) gives a huge opportunity to have an arts stop with an outdoor sculpture park and a historical rail line running through it.

"It could help put Chattanooga on the map for the arts."

Mr. Tune and Mr. Henry will join visiting artists-activists Rick Lowe and Sherri Warner Hunter in discussing the role art plays in city renewal during Saturday’s free public forum from 8:30 a.m. to noon at Hunter Museum of American Art. Called "Artists at Work: Agents of Community Change," the event is sponsored by Allied Arts of Greater Chattanooga.

The forum comes at a time when the city is beginning to implement the public art program announced in May by Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker. He kicked off that project with apledge of $1.2 million in 21st Century Waterfront Plan funds from private donors and hotel/motel tax money.

The public art program calls for permanent and temporary placements of creative works in highly visible and accessible urban areas, according to Peggy Wood Townsend of Allied Arts, who serves as project leader.
She said the Saturday forum was "a good fit" with the public art planning already under way in Chattanooga. The forum’s mix of presenters "provides a really good perspective on the way artists can transform the environments in which they live and work," she said.

Mr. Henry, 60, said the Southside development he and Mr.Tune foresee has elements reminiscent of other celebrated centers of creativity such as New York City’s SoHo neighborhood and Chicago’s arts district.

"It’s close to downtown, it’s near suppliers and it’s a large industrial space," he said of the Chattanooga mill, part of which he revamped into his own studio.

Like SoHo and the Chicago district, which evolved from modest artists’ enclaves into diverse hubs of mixed-use structures, Mr. Henry said the warehouse’s rebirth as an arts haven could enliven South Chattanooga.

"Artists don’t go into a community to live and work with the idea of changing it," he said. "But as the arts community starts to happen, the net result is that the entire community environment is transformed."

Art also can be an instrument of social change, according to Mr. Lowe, 42. The Texas artist founded Project Row Houses, a public arts initiative that renovated 22 shotgun-style homes in Houston’s historic Third Ward.
Built by freed slaves, the houses were empty and vandalized when volunteers revamped them in the 1990s into studios for low-income black artists and transitional homes for young mothers and their children.

"I like to call it a ‘social sculpture,’" he said during a telephone interview.

"It involves architecture, creativity, education, opportunities," he said. "It gets away from the notion of art as an object. It’s more the idea of trying to create an entire neighborhood as a work of art."

Rounding out the speakers roster for the Artists at Work forum is Sherri Warner Hunter, of Bell Buckle, Tenn.

Known for her massive public art constructions, including a piece at the Tennessee Welcome Center in Lookout Valley, she is president of the Community Built Association, a group of architects, designers and artists that spearheads various volunteer-driven arts projects across the nation.

Ms. Townsend said planners of the Artists at Work symposium hope the event will serve as a springboard to further dialogue about arts issues.

"From the artists’ standpoint, we hope they become inspired by seeing how they can create community change in big and small ways," she said.

"For the nonartists, we hope they come away with an understanding of the artists’ terrific value to the community."

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