Window World(s)
coming soon: interviews with window artists
The Dirt Palace has presented artists in our Storefront window forever. Or at least since 2000. At first the cadence was one artist every month. At some point, we realized that this was a lot and we went down to eight per year. We wish we could say that every window has been documented, but things were chaotic at times and some of the wildest windows exist only in memory. Like the time when Arley Marks boarded it up from the outside and sent waves of gossip through the neighborhood. Had a car driven right through the window? Was the Dirt Palace being foreclosed upon? Or wait, was panic over plywood on top of portals the art piece in itself? Another time an artist made a project out of “cash for cars” signs. And it turned out that there was a brutal cash for cars rivalry and one of the people who ran one of these businesses did not see the window as art at all - he just thought that it was a rival’s advertising scheme and broke in and tore it all down. There might be one photo of that installation somewhere.
This is a long winded way of saying that there are a lot of photos of past windows on our website here. But it’s not a perfect collection.
Around 2019 we got a supplemental grant for the window project and we started to do artists talks, which were really fun, but then covid hit. We shifted one artist talk to Zoom. It got Zoom bombed by homophobic creepers, which frankly sucked. We were all trying to keep it together and keep up with technology. Nobody wanted to get the necessary PhD in zoom settings to keep assholes in other time zones from party crashing, so we thought, what if we did written interviews? And thus began what’s been over 5 years of artist interviews. We just used our pre-existing blog to publish them. And we’ll continue to do this till the wheels fall off of the Blogger platform…but frankly it feels like Blogger gets buggier day by day, so we thought, let’s see what happens if we also distribute them via Substack. Will they find new audiences?
We are pretty certain that taking 10 minutes every month and a half to read a quick interview by an artist, with another artist who has recently finished an installation might be fun. This substack will be free as far as the eyes can see, so fingers crossed that you’ll join us!
The first interview will be window artist Malda Smadi being interviewed by poet and playwright Darcie Dennigan - YOU WILL WANT TO READ IT!!!
.