Jim White needed a place to crash. A former Las Vegas artist now based in Tucson, White returned in June to oversee a 10-day exhibit of his collages at the Available Space Art Projects (ASAP) gallery. His travel budget: sub-shoestring. His plan: couch-surfing, possibly with friends of friends of friends. Not ideal for a man in his early 50s with pressing medical concerns.
He was saved from that uncomfortable fate when he connected with Lulu. Lulu is, technically, a funky pink house in a neighborhood near the airport — but functionally it’s much more, for which the term “art house” doesn’t quite suffice. Not exactly a gallery, not really a cultural center, it’s an informal hive of creative activity: studio spaces, display area, monthly dinners, room for its growing community to connect. And a place happy to put up an itinerant artist.
“Lulu is a haven,” White says, “a place to just breathe and be with your art.” Someone from Lulu even picked him up from the airport.
Lulu is one of a number of newish grass- roots creative spaces that foreground a strong ethos of community engagement, inclusiveness, healing energy, and, frequently, a spirit of socially conscious art often called “artivism” — while largely abstaining from the transactional pressures of the gallery scene. Indeed, these spaces resemble mutual-aid projects — such as Solidarity Fridge, a DIY food pantry, and Obodo Collective, an urban farming group — as much as art galleries. Others include Cloud House, the Nuwu Art Gallery + Community Center, and the Indigenous-run Fifth Sun Project. Modest and approachable, they exist far from the madding rents of the Arts District, and in their way constitute an alternative arts district, one united not by geography but by purpose.
“It’s a community space first,” says artist Brooke Feder, a Lulu principal. “I just think our artists happen to be superheroes of community.” Or, as artist Fawn Douglas put it in 2021, as she and partner A.B. Wilkinson were laboriously wrestling a set of dilapidated buildings on Maryland Parkway into Nuwu Art: “We’re looking for community-ass people, people who are active and want change.”
The fashion and conceptual artist Hue (a 2022 Desert Companion “One to Watch”) calls Cloud House “a resource hub and maker space in the heart of the suburban Las Vegas landscape.” They started it after finding the gentrifying Arts District inaccessible. People who have a creative idea but lack the means to realize it can come to Cloud House — actually Hue’s garage; you’ll know it by its namesake paint job — in search of the tools, knowledge, or connections to make it happen, whether it’s a piece of art, a performance, or something more hybrid. As with the others, Cloud House aims to be a place where artists, emerging or experienced, can experiment, pursue offbeat visions, cultivate ambiguity. “The whole idea is to offer a space outside the hyper-productive way of capitalism,” Hue says.
This is where art bends toward activism. At Nuwu, that means platforming the Indigenous artists and creatives of color too little seen in mainstream galleries. At Lulu, you’re apt to encounter an ethic of creative repurposing in the work of such artists as D.K. Sole and Eileen Pascoe, who take consumer detritus and rework it into bright new meanings. “The art,” Feder says, “is calling us to pay attention to something we otherwise weren’t.” As with Cloud House, sometimes it’s about resisting the blanding effects of sales culture. For example, White’s show comprised challenging, experimental collages he reworked each day in the ASAP gallery, inviting viewers into his process. Without Lulu’s accommodations and ASAP’s embrace of work unlikely to move a rent-paying number of units, this compelling exhibit would have been difficult to pull off.
ASAP is a reminder that there’s not a hard either-or distinction between these new places and the standard gallery scene; the energy fluxes both ways. Some of these artists also appear in more formal settings, while spaces such as ASAP and Core Contemporary, both in the burgeoning arts hub at New Orleans Square, often lean into artivism. You can find political art on Main Street, at Recycled Propaganda. Even an institution like UNLV’s Barrick Museum — which pivoted toward artivism during the pandemic — feeds into the new scene. (Indeed, its executive director, artist Alisha Kerlin, is a leader of Lulu.) But what unites Lulu, Cloud House, and the others is their elevation of community into a vital part of the process, blurring the typical artist-audience dynamic and nurturing an important cultural stratum.
This isn’t a new idea, of course. Musicians, for one, have long performed intimate house shows with a message. Long-timers might recall Laser Vida, an influential art gang back in the 1990s or the Lower Oakey Collective, both dedicated to working beyond the mainstream. Left of Center Gallery has provided a focal point for art, community, and education in North Las Vegas since the early 1980s.
What’s different now are the more intense, turbulent, and fractious realities of 2023 — which make these welcoming spaces even more necessary. “It’s like a respite from the obligations of society,” Feder says. “We want people to show up however they are in the moment and feel they can catch a breath.”