Aka Artspace at Untitled

Fundraiser/exhibit/gallery: steamroller festival: Artspace hosted the annual steamroller print festival, a rapidly growing printmaking event for the community. This festival is a free community event. In 2023, the festival celebrated its sixth year, drawing over 230 artists and students. Participants carved large-scale woodblocks to be inked and after covering with cloth using a 5-ton asphalt roller Aka (steamroller) the print is transferred to the fabric. Artspace closed off a three-block section of third street and printed in the street while surrounded by 50 local Art vendors, kids' activities tent, food trucks and street printing occurred. Alongside outdoor printmaking activities, the festival featured inside Artspace's facility live demos of several different printmaking techniques. This festival attracts over 2,000 patrons to the deep deuce area annually. Exquisite corpse costume ball: in 2023, we continued the tradition of hosting the exquisite corpse costume ball as part of our annual programming. This event serves as a crucial fundraiser for both our general programming and mentorship program. It stands as one of our only ticketed events of the year. We were thrilled to welcome over 150 guests to Artspace for an evening celebrating dia de los muertos. The event featured artworks by seven talented latino artists and included a costume contest, live demonstrations, fortune tellers, live auction, silent auction, wine pull, and testimonials from some of our mentorship students. Additionally, the event provided exposure for the 25 local artists featured in the letterpress portion of exquisite boxes. The galleries: Artspace at Untitled features three gallery spaces totaling 7,000 square feet: the main gallery, press gallery, and the hive. In january, the main gallery showcased the private collection of ekpe udoh, a nigerian american basketball player raised in edmond, Oklahoma. The exhibition featured works by artists such as taha clayton, kevin williams, and robert peterson, among others. As part of the exhibition, we invited kevin williams from atlanta to give a talk, which was attended by over 100 people. Our second exhibition featured a magnificent collection of large watercolor works by italian artist riccarda de eccher. Additionally, we hosted several group exhibitions, including our annual mentorship exhibition, exquisite corpse exhibition, and steamroller spotlight artist exhibition. The juried mentorship exhibition displayed work created by our students throughout the year, while the spotlight exhibition featured large-scale relief prints by local artists. Exhibition: the exquisite corpse exhibition, this year was a collaborative effort between seven latino artists and 25 local letterpress artists. Artspace also proudly hosted the annual Oklahoma students Art exhibition, a traveling show featuring juried student work submitted to the Oklahoma state fair.

The hive: the hive, our retail Space, is in the process of being restructured in 2023 and slated to end in 2024. In the past it has served as a museum-style boutique gift shop filled with unique artful objects by local creators. Moving forward, Artspace will utilize this designated gallery to host four invitational exhibits each year, with a focus on craft as fine Art. This expansion of our mission allows us to spotlight local artisans and share their work with the public. The hive will be open throughout the year, offering visitors a fresh and dynamic shopping experience with quarterly exhibits.

Preface: in 2023, Artspace continued its commitment to expanding community outreach efforts and improving internal infrastructure to create a more enriching environment for both makers and students. Our diverse programming includes the mentorship program, artist in residence (air) program, the press studio, and three exhibition spaces, main gallery, press gallery, and the hive. We also host two annual community events such as the exquisite corpse costume ball and the steamroller print festival. In late september of 2023 Artspace had an extensive two-day strategic planning session under the direction of maria birkhead. This five-year plan will help us move forward with newly designed programming that focuses more on education and less on exhibitions. By the end of 2025 we will be fully transitioned to a larger Space, allowing us to expose our youth to more options in programming. This expansion will also allow for more schools and students to enter our program. Our discussions and plan cover revisiting our mission and vision statements, grow our board to add more diversity, and complete our dashboard. Other challenges are staff retention, grant writing and funding. This year we subscribed to kindful, a donor database and are eagerly learning it applications. The mentorship program is one of Artspace's flagship initiatives, providing students from Oklahoma city public schools with arts education beyond what traditional academia offers. Each month, students spend an entire day working in our studios in an incubator environment with visiting artists/mentors. In 2023, we expanded the program to include two additional schools, bringing the total to 14 schools with 158 students monthly. We provide lunch as well as after-school and weekend access to our studios at no cost to the students or their schools. Additionally, we organize field trips for each school to visit other creative Art spaces such as Oklahoma contemporary, Oklahoma city museum of Art, and factory obscura. During the summer, Artspace hosts a stop-motion animation course for interested mentorship students, led by nationally recognized animator nicole emmons. The films created by our students in 2021, 2022, and 2023 were accepted to the deadcenter film festival respectively, and Artspace has officially partnered with deadcenter as a support partner. Under the leadership of annavittoria pickett, the program has been highly successful, attracting the participation of many local film studios and animators. Schools included are: astec hs classen sas hs northwest classen hs harding hs santa fe south hs southeast hs douglas hs emmerson north hs mission academy hs putman heights hs mount st. mary hs star spencer hs belle isle ms roosevelt ms the artist in residence program at Artspace was designed to host four local artists and two to four national/international visiting artists annually. This program serves as a platform for introducing new voices to the community, facilitating dialogue and the exchange of ideas to the benefit of both our mentorship students and the wider community. Since covid we have slowly reinstated this program. Artists in residence are required to conduct a workshop, deliver an artist talk, create an editioned print and exhibit their work. In 2023, our visiting artist in residence was italian artist, riccarda de eccher, while our local artist was laneta going, a retired teacher from one of our partnering mentorship schools. In 2023, we continued to enhance our living quarters, enabling us in the future to fully reinstate our artist in residence program to its capacity. Our press studio is a versatile printmaking facility, offering community access to a range of equipment such as intaglio presses, lithography presses, and letterpresses, among others. Our fiber studio keeps growing and has brought in more artists. This year, we implemented an innovative approach by integrating our mentorship and press/fiber programs. Instead of charging artists for facility use, we established a mentoring partnership, encouraging artists to give back to our mentorship students. This change exceeded our expectations, significantly impacting the artists involved. They enthusiastically embraced the new model, resulting in a doubling of our participating artist population.