Tucked under the main staircase at Albany Barn are artist-decorated chair desks covered in graffiti carvings, religious iconography and a monster molded from wads of chewed gum. Unadorned ones sit on each floor of the adjacent Academy Lofts, and photos of rubble-filled classrooms straight out of a post-apocalyptic, dystopian television show decorate some of the hallways. These scholastic adornments pay homage to the past life of a building almost demolished.
Ten years ago, the Albany Barn broke ground at the derelict St. Joseph’s Academy on Second Street for its new home. Today, the Barn continues to support artists and the Arbor Hill neighborhood through programming and affordable housing with an eye toward extending its mission across the Capital Region.
Background
Albany Barn began as Rock2Rebuild, a grassroots production company co-founded by Jeff Mirel in the wake of the tsunami that hit South Asia in 2004. Rock2Rebuild organized local artists and arts organizations to present a fundraising concert for tsunami victims. Seeing the impact uniting local artists and the community could have, Mirel wanted to continue the energy, and thus emerged the Albany Barn.
“That name was taken from the concept of a barn raising,” Mirel said. “For me that was what that first Rock2Rebuild concert was… it was always that concept of the creative community coming together, and bringing the greater community together, to do good.”
The feedback from artists was overwhelmingly positive, said KP Holler, the former executive director of the Albany Barn who was with the organization from its inception and the current executive director for the Sanctuary for Independent Media. They wanted to continue this kind of creative, community-driven work, but pursuing a full-time artistic career was challenging when they were taking on other jobs to deal with market rate rent for…
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