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Joan Farrenkopf felt that one house in the Hawley-Green district was beckoning to her. It was across the street from a house she restored in the ‘70s. Later, when she was restoring houses in that neighborhood after completing her undergraduate degree, the same house stood out to her.

“I looked at that house and said, ‘That’s it — that’s the culmination of my life’s work,” Farrenkopf said. “It seemed destined to be something.”

Now, the house at 210 Green St. on Syracuse’s Northside is home to the ArtHouse Alliance, a cultural hub for artists that strives to use art to solve social issues. It has housed several artists, including violinist Laura Bossert. The house has also held artists from other countries who wanted to study at Syracuse University’s Setnor School of Music and is currently looking for its next round of residents, said Farrenkopf, the founder of ArtHouse.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the ArtHouse has implemented virtual programs, including an Instagram Live tour of the house and a writing workshop, as well as a youth art program with COVID-19 precautions. ArtHouse hosted a virtual workshop Sunday on fiction, creative nonfiction and memoir writing led by Dana Spiotta, an author and associate professor of English at SU.

Kaitlyn Wheeler, the special projects manager at ArtHouse, said there are not a lot of writing groups in Syracuse that are open for anyone in the community to join.

Before the workshop, Wheeler said she was looking forward to meeting the participants, which included people from SU, Le Moyne College, a Syracuse veterans group and ArtHouse.

“The goal was to create a very diverse group of people here in the Syracuse area and get to know them and create an open community for the writing workshop,” she said.

Community workshops like this connect people from diverse backgrounds, ages and experiences, Spiotta said. Virtual workshops with a small group can work just as well as in-person workshops and that the atmosphere serves as a “counter to the news of the noise and social media,” she said.

ArtHouse has been home to several artists, including violinist Laura Bossert and students from other countries who wanted to study at the Setnor School of Music. Courtesy of ArtHouse Alliance

The workshop also has the potential to turn into a writing group through ArtHouse. Farrenkopf hopes that the participants in the writing workshop will want to continue to meet and share their work.

“The idea of the workshop is to continue later with the potential of this group, if they have interest, of keeping ties and allowing themselves to share what they’re writing if they like or have a reading that would be published by The ArtHouse and people could see what they’re doing,” Farrenkopf said.

Virtual programming allows people who may not have access to transportation to attend, but it is more difficult to get to know the participants at the same level as the online format, Wheeler said.

ArtHouse has been able to use virtual programming to reach a broader and even global audience, Farrenkopf said. Her experience interviewing artists at the Venice Biennale has led her to have “a global viewpoint of the arts,” she said.

“And it seemed like the pandemic just pushed us into really our second year of having to recreate our entire mission and that was about how we reach people, period,” Farrenkopf said. “It is about geography. It is about upstate New York. But it’s also global.”

Through the ArtHouse Delivers program, the organization has also delivered art supplies to people’s doorsteps and talked with them over the phone about the art projects they plan to create.

ArtHouse also has a youth art program called S.A.L.O.N. (Shining a Light on Neighborhoods) led by Rhonda Davis, in which students create art based on their visions of their neighborhood.

“I think the thing about ArtHouse is because its mission isn’t merely about objects — it’s about community — that we can thrive through our virtual events,” Farrenkopf said. “We can still do what we see as important as far as the relationship with the arts and healing our community and connecting us to a regional as well as global scene.”

Published on November 1, 2020 at 9:12 pm

Contact Mandy: ackrayna@syr.edu | @MandyKraynak