±92: Downtown Master Plans, 1932-2009
McLellan Building, 63 E. Congress (NW corner of Scott Ave. and Congress)
Master plans for development tend to be thick, boring documents full of subheadings, summaries, and appendices that few people read. But if they’re displayed the right way in the right place they can become works of art. That’s what four local artists discovered when they mounted an exhibit of over 100 master plans for downtown Tucson in a vacant storefront on that city’s main downtown street.
The exhibit featured realized and unrealized plans spanning the years 1932 to 2009 and borrowed from local libraries and city planners, architects, and collectors. The display included an interactive timeline highlighting local, national and world events, economic and social trends during the years the plans were conceived.
The exhibit was mounted in the front section of an empty storefront space, once the home of McLellan’s “five and dime” store, which closed in the 1970s, and now owned and occupied by John Wesley Miller Companies, a housing development company.
Held over four Saturday evenings in October 2009, +/-92 drew over 700 viewers, a response that astounded the artists—Bill Mackey, Julie Ray, Rachelle Díaz and Kimi Eisele.
“The big surprise was the great number of people that showed up to read quite boring documents,” said Mackey, an artist and architect who collected the master plans. “I guess people still love to talk about ‘What if?’”
In mounting the exhibit, the artists wondered how a display of so many plans might make people rethink their relationship with downtown. Eisele, a writer and dancer and one of the show’s organizers, said, “I didn’t really understand what a master plan was, and that there are two main forces—politics and money—that have to come together perfectly to actually carry one through. I think being an artist is a bit easier than being an urban planner. We don’t really have to plan what we’re doing. We just do it.”
While controversies over both past and current downtown revitalization efforts likely fueled the public’s interest in the exhibit, the artists say their aim was also to present the issue in a neutral way.
“Rather than inviting a group of people to have a discussion about downtown’s past and future—one that would inevitably result in cynicism and complaining—we created a structure for people to explore the topic on multiple levels and in an entertaining and fun way,” said Ray.
In addition to adding events to the timeline, exhibit goers could “judge” existing downtown areas by placing color-coded dots on photographs of various spaces and events. They were also invited to fill out public input surveys about downtown re-development that a crew of performing office workers (called “The Apparatchiks”) promptly collected, processed, and filed. (All survey takers were rewarded a lollipop.) The artists also created a small booklet entitled “A Guide to the Master Plans of Downtown Tucson,” which highlighted 12 of the master plans, offered a brief history of master planning itself, and were sold for $5 each.
Monica Surfaro Spigelman, an exhibit goer and downtown Tucson enthusiast, shared, “The show was a genuine, creative exploration of our city’s many attempts at community place-making. For me, it provided an historical context for the so many projects that have impacted the relationship between Tucson people and structures…between our community and the natural desert environment.”
Anne-Marie Russell, executive director of Tucson’s Museum of Contemporary Art, called the show “a brilliant, community activist oriented conceptual art project” and “an ideal example of the power of art to engage and ultimately transform society.”
About the artists:
Worker Inc. (Bill Mackey): Created in 1995, Worker Inc. is a company that specializes in promoting change in the built environment. In 2007, Worker Inc. saw the need for science based research of the more mundane processes of popular culture and formed the Neighborhood Residents Resources Ethnography Studies Unit.
POP UP SPACES (Rachelle Diaz, Julie Ray): POP UP SPACES seeks to produce temporary, interactive, site-specific installations in empty spaces in which the visitors are not just expected to be passive viewers, but asked to be active participants. The goal of these art-based experiences is to enhance economic vitality and public engagement in downtown Tucson through promotion of the area’s culture, history, architecture and business community.
Design Co*op (Kimi Eisele, Bill Mackey): Design Co*op is a collective of Tucson- based architects, designers, and artists working across disciplines to raise public awareness of the value of affordable and appropriate urban design.