Photo: Viera Levitt

We gathered at AS220, a community and arts space in downtown Providence that is a regional and national treasure – a place where any artist in Rhode Island can put on a show (performing, visual, political – all arts and expression welcome) and where performers from outside the Ocean State compete fiercely to get stage time. I know because my husband the booking agent has tried. Artistic director Bert Crenca has nurtured this remarkable institution from its days as a live/work space for himself and other Providence artists into much more than the arts space – upstairs is home to a youth program where teens can mix music, silkscreen, do computer art etc etc etc, and AS220 has lately been rehabbing historic buildings as artist live/work spaces.

The crowd for the panel was appropriately idealistic. Their questions reflected not only intense concern about the suburbs’ environmental impact but also for the cultural and social consequences of car dependence and limited public space. No creativity, TV instead of the arts, you know the stereotype. I warned them not to get complacent about the virtues of the dense urban environment to cultivate creative enterprise, to look at how New York City has effectively evicted its arts from the urban core, except for big-money establishment institutions that are as much about business as art. The city’s creative hub is now Brooklyn – the old ‘burbs. Now admittedly Brooklyn’s creative scenes cluster in walkable areas, and they’re linked by subway lines (yo, G-train). But the point is that that the economics of space, and mobility between spaces, are at least as important as their density. As inner-ring suburbs evolve as more economically and socially diverse communities than they’ve been historically, their combo of relatively inexpensive real estate, mass transit links and and cultural cross-pollination are bound to make them exciting places for the arts.

Okay, here’s the show.

Thank you host Marc Levitt (no relation to Levittown) for inviting me to Action Speaks! and for an inspired series.