Artspace is a non-profit visual art center dedicated to presenting quality exhibitions and educational programs within an open studio environment and to promoting the visual arts by making the creative process accessible to the public.

Arts & Culture , Arts Education , Visual Arts

Artspace's gallery program includes exhibitions in various formats and scale, including individual, site-specific projects, small solo exhibitions, installations, curated thematic group exhibitions, window installations, an annual artist in residency, and a large city-wide festival that encompasses offsite exhibitions at as many as 65 sites. We invite proposals from artists and curators annually through an open call. A group of 10 elected volunteer artists, curators, and critics serves as a peer-review curatorial advisory board/community action group and assists the staff in the selection of applicants for special funded commissions, and with the planning of portions of the program schedules. The mission of the organization as established in its 2012 strategic plan, and reaffirmed in 2016, is to catalyze artistic activities; connect contemporary artists, audiences, and resources; and enrich art experiences and activate art "spaces". As a means to support artists in other ways, artspace maintains a flatfile of works on paper by approximately 125 local, regional, and national artists juried by our staff curator and the cab. Works on paper include collages, drawings, prints, photographs, paintings on paper, and small books. Art from the flatfile is drawn upon for group and solo exhibitions. The flatfile is a resource for collectors, curators, artists, and students. Artists bring new work to their portfolios annually, creating an ever-changing, dynamic body of affordable artwork. Artspace also offers professional development workshops to aid artists in promoting and presenting their work to curators, galleries and institutions. city-wide open studios - since 1998, artspace has presented city-wide open studios every year. This is our flagship and most popular event. It's a democratic fall festival that brings together as many as 370 area artists with thousands of audience members. Artists in new haven, west haven, hamden and north haven all open their studios in a coordinated fashion. The event is free to the public. To assist artists who cannot afford a studio, or who do not have access to a workspace that can accommodate the public, artspace negotiates with landlords to secure underutilized space. In so doing, vacant buildings are reinvented as exhibition spaces and temporary studios that aid in our ongoing community development efforts. All artists are welcome to participate regardless of training or background. To facilitate the public's discovery of all the sites, and heighten the public's understanding of the creative process, artspace publishes a printed guide with a map to all the studios and an online guide with images from each participating artist. Artspace also organizes guided walking, van, and bike tours and demonstrations. Artspace presented its 19th annual city-wide open studios, showcasing 300 connecticut artists in their studios and temporary spaces. Since the program's inception, artspace has showcased over 2 million square feet of commercial and industrial space in transition, in the service of new haven's economic development. About half of this space has gone on to find new tenants, uses and owners. Our festival theme in fall 2016 was game on! And we established partnerships with yale school of medicine, quinnipiac's video and game department, and others. To help artists prepare for city-wide open studios, artspace organized a unique professional development workshop speed/networking/live! In which 20 esteemed curators came to coach artists, each spending 5-6 minutes with an equal number of artists. This has become a hallmark program, emulated by peer organizations. The city of f new haven contributed the 200,000 sq ft goffe st armory for exhibition space for the event. As a fundraiser and educational event, we continued to refine and enhance the featured series of special tours, led by a curator and focusing on a few studios of notable artists. youth and education programs - artspace organizes a ra