Art Space at Soap Factory
The Soap Factory’s building—a formidable if weathered 48,000 square foot wood-and-brick cut of a structure—appears out of place amid the renovated warehouses and splashy redesigned grain mills that line the north side of the Mississippi in downtown Minneapolis. The views: Spectacular. The foot and bike traffic: Heavy. The area: Increasingly “the” place to live for the cool—and financially able—young, urban crowd.
Yet for those who stumble across buildings like the Soap Factory and the few other un-renovated spaces that remain in the area, a window to the past—perhaps even portals to the present and the future of the waterfront area—open up. The Twin Cities—dare we call it “alternative”—art scene reveals itself in these worn buildings and seemingly dilapidated spaces, an alternative scene deeply intertwined with and necessarily inseparable from the shiny new buildings and hip metropolitan spaces that surround it.
Unlike riverfront developers with their grand visions for the (now mostly transformed) millworks and warehouses in the area, Executive Director Ben Heywood and his colleagues have no intent of turning the Soap Factory building into a highly polished showroom or a high-end art gallery. Rather, Heywood and his Soap Factory colleagues see a vital need to retain the challenging, cavernous exhibition spaces the building offers as an imperative aspect of their efforts to continue making art accessible to a wide-range of individuals. Unassuming spaces invite uninitiated spectators. The juxtaposition of old and new is key to the Soap Factory’s mission, Heywood notes, and key to bringing in the kind of audience that might not otherwise engage art.
But, for artists, the Soap Factory space can be far from unimposing. As Heywood notes, it is key that artists who exhibit—or who want to exhibit—in the Soap’s space understand that their artwork must explicitly and consciously take into consideration the size and the surface of the building that is, as the name suggests, home to the former National Purity Soap Factory. The building and the challenges it presents to artists, Heywood notes, does not mean that the Soap Factory is “anti-artist.” Rather, the Soap’s history demonstrates its commitment to artists and artistic development, even if at first this emphasis on recognizing the role of the Soap Factory’s space as part of the art exhibited appears to contradict the organization’s artist-focused philosophy.
Artists are the focus, as Heywood and the website both indicate. The Soap Factory is “unabashedly artist-centered.” This focus on developing emerging, local artists is part of the organizations relatively long history. Established in 1988 by a small group of artists as No Name Exhibitions @ The Soap Factory, the art center still seeks to focus on emerging visual art in the Twin Cities. The Soap still fills a “crucial niche” in the area, Heywood claims, by providing, as their website attests, “a supportive environment for artists who are at the beginning of their careers or who are exploring new genres of expression.”
Attendance would suggest the Soap Factory’s efforts continue to be—indeed, are increasingly—successful. Their website notes that in 2008, over 130 artists exhibited in the space and over 20,000 visitors attended opening night events, toured exhibits, or participated in special events.
If the space of the Soap Factory, and in particular the building’s still-visible raw and industrial past uses, present a less intimidating, more inviting environment to the uninitiated art viewer, the Soap Factory’s fundraising efforts reveal other ways that the organization strives to attract this reticent audience. From a $99 art sale to the rental of the space for wedding receptions to the annual Haunted Basement, making the space of the Soap Factory accessible to the non-initiated proves key to the organization’s efforts to make art accessible as well. Heywood notes that this audience is “the niche” that the Soap Factory addresses in the Twin Cities; the Soap is the venue where individuals less-likely to engage art in a more traditional exhibition venue can encounter art, even if somewhat indirectly. Take, for example, the Soap Factory’s annual—and exceptionally successful—Haunted Basement event. Is this “really” art?
The success of the Haunted Basement alone—which Heywood acknowledges may appear a far cry from making art and artists accessible to the public—is astounding. And efforts to continually expand the number of visitors the event can handle have only been met with greater demand. This year, Heywood ruminates, the Soap Factory plans to open the Haunted Basement for the entire month of October. Issues of safety and insurance are addressed through innovative strategies—having only a certain number of Haunted House attendees in the space at any one time, for example. And many of the performers in the event are working artists, or those who support the work of the Soap Factory in other ways, too. Heywood notes, impressively, that last year the event brought in roughly 12,000 visitors to the Soap Factory, 70% of whom have never been in the area before and 90% of whom have never stepped inside an art gallery.
Despite what some would suggest is crass commercialism, Heywood defends the Haunted Basement, as well as the Soap’s rental of its space for other, non-art-related events like wedding receptions. He suggests that opening the Soap Factory doors to large groups of people who otherwise might never set foot in an art museum or a gallery space does a great service in making these individuals more comfortable with being in—and returning to—what is primarily an art exhibition venue.
To this end, Heywood openly and directly contrasts the approach of the Soap Factory to local museums like the Weisman or the Walker, where viewing art becomes an intimidating affair. Even when a show fails at one of these venues, Hayward claims, everyone pretends that the shows are successes. They cost too much money, he suggests, and openly acknowledging that exhibits at these venues fail is verboten.
But the Soap Factory faces challenges other than financial, challenges that are a continual and active part of its exhibition efforts and its community engagement. Issues of gender, race, and national origin, for example, come up at various points in our conversation with Heywood. He notes that the Soap Factory tries to provide an exhibition schedule that reflects a balanced slate of male and female artists. As Executive Director, Heywood also suggests that there is a challenge in connecting many arts foundations’ requests for minority arts representation in an arts scene like that of the Twin Cities, where there are minority communities with a different approach to—perhaps even a lack of—a visual arts tradition. The Somali community presents a case in point for Heywood. It is tough, he notes, finding and showing the work of artists from this community despite the large Twin Cities Somali population. He attributes the challenge, in part, to an apparent lack of focus on visual culture in the Somali community. Added to the mix is the Soap’s efforts to bring international artists to the Twin Cities. The organization struggles with finding an equitable balance between international and local artists. Heywood indicates that currently the Soap’s exhibitions are comprised of roughly 60% local artists, and 40% international. He envisions that the planned funding initiative and residency program will be key in helping balancing the uneven split between the local and the international.
Making these issues visible through the Soap Factory’s grant applications and arts exhibitions presents a challenge, to the Soap Factory as well as to the greater Twin Cities arts community. Yet Heywood and his colleagues are actively and consciously aware of these issues, and their current programs and future plans reflect their continued efforts to address them.
Indeed, not afraid to provoke the status quo, Heywood suggests that the Soap Factory challenges not only the existing arts community and the uninitiated arts viewer, but also challenges artists themselves. Artists have to design work for the Soap Factory space, or at least design their exhibitions with a conscious recognition of how much the space influences the viewing experience of the works. Those artists ultimately fail who try to simply show their work in the space without recognizing how much they—and their work—need to negotiate with the Soap Factory’s building itself.
In its own negotiations—with exhibition space, with social issues, with riverfront development—the Soap Factory, with its firmly established twenty-plus year presence in the Twin Cities “alternative” art scene, continues to provide a challenging space to experience art, for artists and audiences alike.
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