Exquisite Corpse: Art that's alive and kicking

Eana Agopian's gaze wanders out the third floor wall of windows to look west across Kalamazoo and Kalamazoo Avenue below. "During a sunset," she says, "those buildings all turn pink and orange."

Spoken like an artist. And Eana is. She is a studio member, once manager, of Exquisite Corpse,  an artist collaborative and gallery in Park Trades Center, 326 W. Kalamazoo Avenue in Studio 301. The gallery is open to the public by appointment and on the first Friday of every month, during Art Hops, when 300 to 500 people might come through in a matter of hours.

As nearly all space inside the vintage Park Trades Center does, this studio has uneven and scuffed hardwood floors, pipes and ducts that hang from the high ceiling, and windows that show their age. A looping string of painted paper hearts hangs from one corner of the gallery to the other. Every corner and nook of the room, every wall, is covered with art -- posters, paintings, drawings, photographs. From the variation in styles, it's clear there is more than one artist at work here.

"The whole thing started with artists Beverly Fitzpatrick, Leslie Grossman and Ethan Colyer daydreaming about having a studio," Agopian says. "They came up with an idea for a button vending machine, and they used it to save up enough money to rent a space in the Park Trades Center."

That button vending machine called Arty Pants Button Mart, still sits in the studio, and has sister machines at various spots across Kalamazoo (check them out at Fourth Coast or People's Food Co-op) that entice curious button buyers. They become intrigued with choosing random collage-like pieces of art that can then be pressed into wearable metal buttons. No two buttons are alike. At 50 cents a pop, it takes a lot of buttons to pay rent, but the buttons sell well.

"They knew they wanted a workspace and a gallery space from the get-go," Agopian says as she continues her story, "but it wasn't about showing their own work. They wanted to show the kind of artwork they wished they could see when they went out to look at art in Kalamazoo."

The original space created by these three artists was called Studio 124. About a year-and-a-half later, two more artists, Chien King and Kirsten Field, joined Fitzpatrick and Grossman in the collaborative studio and moved into the current space at studio 301. They named the new studio and gallery Exquisite Corpse.

The term "exquisite cadaver" comes from the French "cadavre exquis." Originally, in the early 1900s, exquisite corpse referred to a collaborative work of writing, with many writers adding to the work of preceding writers. The writer making the most recent addition may or many not be able to see the one that comes before it. Eventually, visual artists adopted the process by adding images to new folds of paper, creating an accordion-like effect, or a collage of drawings that become one surreal drawing when unfolded as a whole.

The name fit what the Kalamazoo artists wanted to create: a space for artists to make art, each artist with his or her medium and unique style, and a collaboration that offered support to all.

"We have 10 to 12 art shows per year in our gallery space," Agopian says. "Easily, we have shown some 50 artists over the years -- solo shows, juried and group shows. Probably a lot more than that! We've never been in it for the money. There's a flat fee for use of the space but otherwise no commission on sales. The artists setting up studios here have varied over the years, but it's rare to have more than two artists working here at any one time. We all keep different hours."

The first show sponsored by the gallery was a Dia de Los Muertos show. Members who have come and gone include: Heidi Weiss, Tom Howes, Jennifer Moss, Maggen Millen, Jeff Evergreen and Eana Agopian. Current members are artists Nikki Kazmar, Brittany Bauman, Emily May and Emma Mason.

With time, Exquisite Corpse has grown beyond its own walls. Even as the shows continue inside, the artists have taken on art projects throughout the community.

"We partner with local non-profit organizations, doing art installations. The gallery is not a containing space," Agopian says.

One artistic collaboration involves renting large vehicles, placing them around town and opening up the back and bringing art directly to the public -- a kind of portable gallery. Another collaboration pairs artists with a new Kalamazoo-based art magazine, called Asylum Lake, that features the work of gallery artists.

"I'm working on an art project idea for this fall." Agopian's eyes light up. "I'm thinking of calling it a CSA."

CSA? Those who love veggies know CSA as community-supported agriculture, an arrangement in which community members buy shares of garden harvests from local farmers. Agopian's idea, however, is to market community-supported art.

"We are talking about nine artists collaborating on this CSA," she explains. "Each artist will produce one art piece per share, so that the purchaser of the share receives a box of nine small pieces of art -- a mug, a photo, a button, a painting …"

The Exquisite Corpse artists try to gather for monthly meetings to come up with such ideas, as well as to review who is doing what for the collaborative. Someone has to clean, someone has to organize for the Art Hop, someone has to oversee the gallery newsletter, someone has to count the money, someone has to manage what Agopian calls "the technical stuff."

"I'm a good organizer." She laughs. "Although I don't keep a studio here anymore." Agopian has a hand in many art mediums, but a favorite is creating collages. "I collect small, pretty things." Working at home, she says, makes it easier to spread out her small, pretty things, without fear of disruption, as she works on several collages at once. Agopian's next show will be on exhibit at Exquisite Corpse in October 2012, tentatively titled "Archive."

A disadvantage of working at the studio, she found, was that Art Hop visitors, important as they are to the gallery's well-being, can get overly touchy-feely with art. They even open drawers and mess with materials.  

For whatever disadvantages of a collaborative and public studio, however, Agopian believes there is plenty of life in this "corpse." Just watch what these artists will come up with next.

Zinta Aistars is a freelance writer from Hopkins and editor of the literary ezine The Smoking Poet.

Photos by Erik Holladay