Over a decade ago I lived in Knoxville, TN in the shadow of an interstate bridge and next door to a semi-defunct neighborhood center. Through a series of serendipitous events, my friends and I rented the building from the neighborhood association and established a community arts space called the Birdhouse. As the Birdhouse we rented studios to artists, musicians, and dancers, we ran workshops, we hosted meetings for non-profit groups, we mounted monthly art exhibits, and we booked bands and weirdo performers on their tours through the southeast. It was great. It was heady, sweaty, banging, slap-dash, wonderful. I saw work/shows/art that I might never have come across anywhere else in the city, I met fascinating people, and I gained an appreciation for the logistics and maintenance that make creative work possible.
I’ve been living outside of TN for 8 years now, but the Birdhouse has, until recently, continued to serve the Knoxville and the 4th and Gill Neighborhood by providing space for creative, skill-sharing, and community-based work. Like many creative and commercial spaces, it slowed and then stopped during COVID. And now I hear it’s gone. The building remains, but the people who put in the labor to update calendars, mop the floors, purchase insurance, post the flyers, and take the tickets– they’ve moved on. It’s a lot of work. I don’t begrudge anyone for needing to set that down.
A part of me mourns the end of this era as a larger sign of the times. I now live in Green Bay, a smaller city that boasts an NFL football team and a state university but has almost no non-profit art galleries, no weirdo house show spaces (that I know of), and no go-to spot to host your clothing swap or your workshop on hugelkultur. Sometimes those types of things happen on the college campus where I work, but they remain largely inaccessible to the broader public. There is a punk bar in town, but there’s not an all-ages spot where a high school student could catch an avant-garde puppet show or mosh to the touring band from out of town. This matters because what we see and experience fuels what we can dream and imagine. The internet is vast and glorious (sometimes) but it cannot approximate the feeling of being in the room, with other people, experiencing it all in real-time. It’s not specific to this place and it doesn’t bring together local creatives in the way public events do.
It may be that some of this stuff is happening here and I just don’t know about it because I’m older and out of touch. I hope that’s the case and not that none of it exists. Our city leaders would like Green Bay to be a place that creative young people want to move to and spend their money in. My theory is that we’ll continue to have a hard time cultivating the creative community of this town because we don’t have the fertile soil that comes from small, weird, all-ages spaces where young people can come up seeing older artists, musicians, and writers do their thing. These spaces are hard to establish and maintain. They cost a lot of money and they make very little. Or they prioritize making money and cannot reliably serve as a venue for fringe acts, patrons who can’t buy drinks, and non-profit meetings.
I don’t have a solution for bringing such odd-ball, low-rent, and virtually no-profit spaces to our town. How can I support the development of the house-show-type spaces I’m mourning here? It may be that those things cannot take root in Green Bay. For example, we’re out of the way for national touring acts. But I’d like to see it and will keep hoping for it in the meantime.
