At MTS Gallery, there will be live jazz inside, spoken word and local music outside. An old wooden warehouse will be brimming with an art exhibit called "Salon des Adieu Mobile Trailer Supply," showcasing work from a wide range of Anchorage artists. Community members will eat, drink and catapult balloons of paint at the Trailer Art Center building, creating their own masterpiece.
Sounds like a party.
"I like to call it the three-ring-circus effect," artist Sheila Wyne said as she described her vision of the MTS Gallery goodbye party in Mountain View on Saturday.
This celebration will also serve as Wyne's annual studio party, which she typically hosts at her Spenard home. It's a fundraiser for local art as well as a farewell to a space where visual and performance artists have gathered for the last seven years.
The MTS Gallery is closing.
Special Olympics Alaska is acquiring the property from the Anchorage Community Land Trust, which originally purchased the Mobile Trailer Supply building for a loose network of artists who called the space the Trailer Art Center. The center housed the MTS Gallery, and the folks who strived to create a multidisciplinary art center within the space are realizing it's time to move on.
The gallery, the most successful program of the Trailer Art Center, officially opened in 2006. But since 2005, when that original group of artists hosted a welcome party called the Artists Have Landed, the Trailer Art Center has been a workspace and venue for countless local and visiting artists.
Just this month, Wyne has been using the space to finish up a project called "Big Game," which will reside at Dimond High School. This piece features three stilt walkers 12 feet off the ground, dressed as a lynx, king eider and a caribou. Since Wyne's personal studio was too small to house this massive project, the Trailer Art Center provided relief.
Several other artists are using the space up until the doors close. Mark Gould of Kachemak Cooperage has produced his custom woodwork there for years.
But in the end, the Trailer Art Center will be most remembered for the MTS Gallery and as a place for First Friday performance art.
"People would just show up and go, 'I have no idea if I'm going to like it but I just come every month because I'm always surprised and I always know I'm going to see something I've never seen before,' " said Bruce Farnsworth, an Anchorage poet and gallery director.
But Farnsworth can't say the Trailer Art Center was a success in his mind. He wanted to bring artists of many disciplines together so they could interact, cross-pollinate and collaborate.
"Everyone was kind of a little isolated node out there, and we wanted to provide a place where an electricity could sort of be constantly arching. We failed," Farnsworth said. "We came really close, but we weren't able to do it."
Former Anchorage artist Ruby S. Kennell might disagree with the word "failure." She plainly states the MTS Gallery paved a path for her future as an artist.
"I've always felt picked up by the gallery, supported and adored. As a young insecure artist with a whole heap to say, the gallery offered me the best thing I could ask for: support, a space and a deadline."
Kennell said this opportunity and collaboration shaped her perspective on what was possible and important. She says she's been searching for a space in Los Angeles that would support this kind of "strange behavior."
Steph Kese and Erin Pollock are a team of Anchorage artists who say they work together so seamlessly that it's sometimes hard to tell who should take credit for their ideas. The two had their "367 lbs of Wax" exhibit at MTS in July and August 2009.
"The gallery took a lot of risks on a lot of new faces and hands," Kese said. "And we were able to transform the space in a way that a lot of galleries wouldn't have let us," Pollock said, finishing Kese's sentence.
As a bookend to the Artists Have Landed, the gallery will throw itself a huge farewell Saturday with the Artists Have Left the Building.
As for the community that's formed as a result of the space: "We'll do stuff," Farnsworth said. "We just seem to not be able to stop ourselves."
Rosey Robards
Daily News correspondent
Anchorage