The Philadelphia Story

PHILADELPHIA—“For the price of a small studio in New York you can rent a whole house in Philadelphia,” says Ben Carlson, a 24-year-old artist who left an apartment in Brooklyn and a job at a Chelsea gallery for the city of brotherly love almost a year ago. Now he has an apartment that costs less than half what his Brooklyn space did, a part-time job assisting a photographer, and enough time and money to maintain a separate studio space. “When I lived in New York,” he said, “I had the sense that everyone my age felt like they could barely afford to live there. I spent all my time working.”

For Carlson, like many artists, the advantages of a move to Philadelphia are obvious: You get more space for less money, while still being within a few hours of New York. But while Philadelphia has long drawn young or struggling artists, now artists are moving there—and staying put—even after achieving a measure of success elsewhere. “There is a lot of freedom here,” said Adam Wallacavage, who published Monster Size Monsters, a photography monograph, last year and also shows his sculptures—functioning chandeliers shaped like octopuses—with Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York. “I can own a house, have a car, ride a bike, jump on a bus to NYC, fly to L.A. Basically I can do whatever I want and just go to other cities if there is work there.”

No One Put Their Foot Down
Ryan Trecartin was fresh off several successes—he was the youngest artist included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and had just mounted a big solo show in Los Angeles at QED (via New York’s Elizabeth Dee Gallery, where he has a solo show up now)—when he relocated to Philadelphia with several friends and collaborators last year. He didn’t intend to end up there. After graduating from RISD in 2004, he and classmate Lizzie Fitch toured the country looking for a place to live. They decided on New Orleans and moved there with friends but were driven out almost exactly a year later by Hurricane Katrina.

Not sure where to go, the group—by then six people—temporarily relocated to L.A., where Trecartin had his QED show coming up, for seven or eight months, but they didn’t care for it. “As exciting as L.A. was in other aspects, it was too much to manage,” says Fitch. But planning a group relocation wasn’t easy. “Moving with six people, everyone vetoes some place. Philadelphia was the one place that no one put their foot down about.”

Now Trecartin and Fitch live separately, both with roommates, in the city’s Queen Village section, and share a 4,000-square-foot studio, for which they pay $1,200 a month. “Our studio is cheap,” Fitch says, “but some of our other friends have found spaces that are not as well taken care of, but are really, really inexpensive and have a lot of space. That’s one thing that’s really appealing about Philadelphia. There’s a lot of extra space here.”

Ultimately, what cheaper spaces bring is time. Between the lower costs in Philadelphia and the commercial success they’ve seen in the last year or so, Fitch and Trecartin, both in their mid-20s, have been able to devote themselves full-time to their work. “In a practical sense, living in Philadelphia has affected my work in that I’ve had the opportunity to make so much more of it,” says Fitch.

Plentiful Space, But Is Anyone Buying?
Cheap space also brings places to show, in particular places to show without sales pressure. In the past several months, new art spaces have popped up all over Philadelphia, such as Bobos on 9th, a barbershop-turned-gallery in South Philly that just hosted its first show, of sculptures by Fitch. And the Crane Arts Building—a complex of inexpensive studios and shared spaces for printmaking, sculpture, painting, ceramics, multimedia, and restoration that opened in 2004—hosts several shows every month in its various exhibition spaces, which include a 5,000-square-foot converted freezer called the Ice Box (the early-20th-century warehouse once served as a seafood processing plant).

But the city’s most legendary alternative location is Space 1026, a collaborative studio and exhibition space started by five friends in 1997. Wallacavage, one of the five, calls it a “work/studio/gallery/play land/hangout” and “just a place that a bunch of people rent and split the costs by the amount of studio space you have.” The common areas shared by the 40-plus members, he says, “are maintained by motivation to have a nice place to work.”