A woman walks past the windows of the vacant Chattanooga Bank Building. Open Spaces, a new program for the River City Co. to put art pieces inside empty window spaces, will concentrate on buildings in the 600 and 700 blocks of Market Street.
An empty store-front in New York features digital birds that fly away when the viewer calls the phone number on the display. River City Co. wants to use ideas like this to attract tenants to vacant properties in Chattanooga.TO APPLYWhat: Applications are being accepted and must be sent electronically before 5 p.m. on July 2. The application form can be found at www.openspaceschattanooga.com.Who: Anyone over 18 and now residing in the United States can make an installation proposal, though the pieces cannot promote a product or public/private agenda.Judging: A panel comprised of people from Public Art Chattanooga, Association for Visual Arts, Lyndhurst, River City Company and other invested partners will choose the finalists, who will be notified by July 30. The works will be unveiled Oct. 3.
It is a commonly held belief that the best way to sell a home, especially an unoccupied one, is to stage it with furniture to give potential buyers an idea of what it could look like.
Planners at River City Co., a downtown development agency, have created a similar plan to attract businesses to empty commercial spaces along Market Street between Sixth and Eighth streets. Instead of filling the spaces with tables and chairs, however, they will use art installations that feature light and interactive elements.
Open Spaces hopes to use the talents of artists, architects, engineers, designers and other creatives to come up with ideas that will turn a blank storefront window into an art piece that will make people stop and play a video game, or dial a number on their cellphones that makes a flock of digital birds sitting on a phone wire suddenly take flight, for example. The project is being funded by a grant from the Lyndhurst Foundation.
“We know that people don’t like to walk by an empty building because they don’t feel safe, and even if they do walk by, pretty soon they stop looking inside or even noticing it,” said Paige Southard, program coordinator with River City Co.