AS220’s wild ride On its 20th anniversary, Bert Crenca tells how the upstart arts group survived and thrived in Providence BY IAN DONNIS

AS220’s downstairs café and performance space is a shell of its former self. Stripped practically to the floorboards and dissembled as part of a major expansion, this clamorous state of reinvention marks a fitting metaphor as the venerable nonprofit arts space on Providence’s Empire Street prepares to celebrate its 20th anniversary with a daylong festival on Saturday, July 16 (the Phoenix is a co-sponsor).

The changes will soon double AS220’s first-floor space, making room for a separate performance center and a new and reconfigured café (the improvements, to a building that was part of a de facto red light district in the early ’90s, will include a freestanding "black box" theater next door at Perishable Theatre). Meanwhile, AS220, after having acquired the nearby Dreyfus Hotel building on Washington Street, is moving ahead with plans to outfit it with a variety of live-work and work-only studio spaces. The project is due to be complete in about 18 months.

We recently sat down to discuss AS220’s past, present, and future with artistic director Umberto Crenca, 54, who helped to conceive the organization after reinventing his own life. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

How did AS220 get started, and what were the original goals?

Of course, it’s a story that’s been told over and over again, and I don’t mind telling it.

It started with $800 and a manifesto. The first two people were Scott Seyboldt and Susan Clausen, and then a short time after that, Peter Boyle, and a whole number of other people who got involved to help us get this going, Keith Munslow, Joe Auger, a whole new contingent from West Warwick, Jerry Heroux. All of these different people who participated early on, and also a lot of people who just sort of wandered in from the street. Our first location was on the third floor of the [Providence] Performing Arts Center, which was really office space, but we made it into a performance space with a few studios on that floor. We just started providing times and opportunities for people to perform and exhibit. And the whole concept of AS220 from the very beginning was the idea of the unjuried mission — providing anybody and everybody from the state of Rhode Island who did original material an opportunity to perform and exhibit. And that’s still what we do, 20 years later.

Our primary audience and primary constituency are local artists of all types and every genre. A lot of times when I say the word "artist," people think visually, but when I say the word "artist," I mean everybody — dancers, filmmakers, rock and rollers, jazz people, performance artists, whatever. That actually was a result of a process that I had gone through with some other friends, most notably Steven Emma and Martha. We had produced an event called the Rhode Island Art Event — I think it was 1982 or ’83 — where we did an unjuried event. We had a manifesto. That whole process was sort of where the idea of AS220 was born. And that Rhode Island Art Event was a reaction to an exhibit and a panning review of a show of mine. It was a panning review of my show, a very short sweet panning, by [the Providence Journal’s] Channing Gray, which in retrospect was a completely accurate critique. And in some ways, we owe Channing Gray for our existence, because it brought artists together and we started complaining about the scene.

We started meeting at my house for about four months, if I recall correctly, and we produced a manifesto. Now, there may have been up to a dozen artists initially involved in that conversation. The only people who finally signed that manifesto were myself, Steve Emma, and Martha, because most of the other artists felt that it was confrontational, too aggressive in nature, and yet every paper in the state, just about, printed it, including the Journal. So the Journal printed it, all the weeklies printed it, and we got tremendous response.

Simultaneously, I was going through a separation and eventual divorce. I had worked for Fleet [Bank] for a long time. Then I was working for a place called Zytron. I was going through big changes in my own life, changing from what was a fairly predictable conservative lifestyle on appearances, with a house in the suburbs, and that kind of stuff, to wanting to be 100 percent artist. When I made that decision, which led to a divorce in my first marriage, there was also this kind of sense that there isn’t a single location with the exception of Leo’s bar. There wasn’t a real location or focal point, for artists to convene and share in the state of Rhode Island, independent of the marketability of the work that they do. So there were clubs and stuff, even though when we opened in 1985, clubs are starting to close — ’85, ’86, ’87, the Living Room, the Met, Lupo’s, all these places close. So, frankly, AS220 was the only thing, the only opportunity for original material at all, and even in the commercial world of music and the commercial world of visual art, there isn’t that much opportunity for people coming up, doing original material. [After traveling] I wanted to get something started that would create some kind of — I don’t know the word — locus.

I started really on Charles Street; Ben Weiss had a gallery. That didn’t work out perfectly well, so I decided to do it on my own. I said I want to do this thing and I got a few hundred dollars; I could put down one month’s rent, we’ll write a manifesto, and we’ll let it fly. Susan said no. Scott said let me think about it. And both of them, shortly after this, were convinced that this is a good idea, and they gave their life’s blood to help making this happen.