601 Tully Street
Syracuse, NY 13204
601 Tully is a center for engaged practice in Syracuse, NY developed by artist and professor Marion Wilson with a rotating collaborative team of 54 students and neighbors and Anda French of French 2Design. 601 Tully opened to the public in June 2011 as a site for meaningful exchange between artists, community members, and scholars in the co-production of culture.
601 Tully includes a contemporary art space, a public events space, a bookstore, a teaching garden, and Café Kubal. The reclamation of 601 Tully Street began with Wilson purchasing the then abandoned two-story home and local drug hub situated on a prominent corner, next door to a school and across the street from a city park in the ninth poorest neighborhood in the country.
Throughout five semesters beginning in 2009, Wilson’s rotating collaborative design/build class (TA’d by Samantha Harmon and Zach Seibold) re-zoned, designed, renovated and now sustains the physical and programmatic aspects of 601 Tully. The collaborative team has consisted of artists, architects, environmentalists, Fowler High School students, Green Train Workforce, neighbors, and the occasional passerby.
French 2D is the partnership of sisters Anda French and Jenny French. The architectural design practice thrives on tackling complex issues surrounding existing and changing conditions by viewing all problems as generative and artful design opportunities.
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT: 601 Tully’s Inaugural Exhibit
through December 9, 2011
The Butterfly Effect is 601 Tully’s first multimedia exhibition. The actual and conceptual life of a butterfly is a departure point for a collaborative exhibition that places humans and butterflies together in a micro-habitat inside an art space.
The exhibition introduces the 601 Tully site not as an object in the field, but as part of the field, and embodies the philosophies of 601 Tully as a sensitive, dependent system operating between University and neighborhood ecologies. 601 Tully is a concrete site, a curriculum, an idea, and an artifact of collective experience that, like the butterfly effect, can appear at times random or out of place but is actually part of a complex, interlocking system.
The centerpiece of the exhibit is a living butterfly habitat constructed by students from Marion Wilson’s “Artist and Social Profit” interdisciplinary class, using local reclaimed materials.
601 Tully is made possible by the generous support of the Syracuse University, The Kauffman Foundation, The Near West Side Initiative, Imagining America, Home HeadQuarters Inc., Say Yes to Education, and National Grid.
The Blue Wednesday Coffee Club is a twice-monthly meeting at 601 Tully’s Café Kubal created to foster a continued dialogue between the 601 Tully staff, neighbors, and other potential collaborators.
Marion Wilson has had exhibitions or completed public commissions with New Museum of Contemporary Art; Frederieke Taylor Gallery, NYC; KK Projects, New Orleans; Dorsky Gallery: Exit Art, Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts; Sculpture Center; Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, SPACES; Everson Museum of Art; and SCOPE Miami/Art Basel. Wilson has had residencies at Millay Colony for the Arts; International Studio Program (NYSCA and Elizabeth Foundation), Sculpture Space, and Wave Hill. Wilson has been reviewed in TimeOut New York, New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Art in America. Wilson received her B.A. from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT; M.A. from Columbia University and M.F.A. from University of Cincinnati, OH.
Marion Wilson also created and directs MLAB, a renovated 1984 American Eagle RV into a mobile literacy arts bus collaboratively with a design team of artists, architects and designers as a result of her belief in the revitalization of urban spaces through the arts. Marion Wilson’s book Bus Stops, Counter Tops and Corner Stores documenting her art and social practice will be published in 2012.
601tully.blogspot.com
marionwilson.com
www.frederieketaylorgallery.com
mobileliteracyartsbus.blogspot.com
[email protected] / 315 575 6488
