: SELECTED PRESS / ESSAYS

DECATUR BLUE
DB Sides (catalogue essay)
By W.C. Richardson
December 2002

>> Enter: Decatur Blue
How do you get it going in the art world? How do you get your work done? How do you get it out there for people to see? How do you get the right people to see it? These are questions young artists have asked for generations. When they ask me, I always offer the same advice: Find other artists you respect. Interact, share, critique, party. Put yourself in a position to work. And, above all, do the work.

I offer Decatur Blue, and the artists that comprise the collective enterprise under that name, as one example of how to get it going.

In January 2000, Javier Cuellar, Ryan Hackett, Jose Ruiz, Stoff Smulson and Champ Taylor got together and rented studio space. Decatur Blue was the name they chose for a funky conglomeration of rooms and spaces above an auto body repair shop at 919 Florida Ave., NW. Gabriel Martinez and Brian Balderston, artists who were involved from the beginning and whose work was exhibited during the first year, joined the group officially in 2001. The collective identity of Decatur Blue grew from the interaction of these artists. They didn’t have a program or a plan from the outset, they just wanted studios. They fixed up the space, worked, talked, critiqued, played music, partied and worked some more.

After a few months they decided to have a show of what they had been doing. It was really just open studios with music and drinks, but it worked. Their circle of friends was large and people showed up to see what was happening. It was jammed, loud, sweaty, and fertile. Something was going on. It felt like a scene. Choosing the name Decatur Blue, taken from a nearby African American Civil War memorial, had tagged the space as something more than simply these artists’ studios. Hours of labor – hanging drywall, painting, fixing floors, wiring, installing lights – and especially the willingness to pack all their own work away for the exhibitions they mounted, further marked the space as more than just studios. The success of the early openings energized the artists. They began organizing shows on a regular basis, upgrading the space at each event. Word spread, the crowds grew. Something was definitely happening at Decatur Blue.

The eclectic shows they mounted, fourteen exhibitions in three years, were culled from a rich broth of young artists in DC, New York, and Colombia (Cuellar’s connections). A number of the DB artists were involved in the local music scene as well. It seemed only natural that they would also put together music programs featuring local bands, as well as some from California, Chicago, Texas, Jamaica, Poland and Japan, among other places. This added to the buzz. Decatur Blue was on the map.

The mixture of painting, photography, sculpture, installation, electronic media and video exhibited at DB reflects the varied, evolving interests of the principal artists. In the process, Washington has been given a refreshing glimpse of what some of its young artists are doing. The most recent DB effort was a show of Eleven Bulls, an artist group from Brooklyn, NY. This was the first leg of an exchange program and the artists of Decatur Blue will show their work there in the near future. Javier Cuellar, a founding member, has returned home to Bogotá with hopes of establishing an international element in Decatur Blue’s expanding web.

DB sides was made possible when Annie Adjchavanich, Executive Director of the Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran and an early supporter of a number of the DB artists, asked them to curate a show from the WPA\C’s ArtFile. Her faith in them, first as artists and then as producers of exhibitions and musical programs, is testimony to the quality of their venture.
The title of this show, with its sly reference to “B sides,” and its catalogue, presented in CD form with examples of music from some of the bands that have played at Decatur Blue, are expressions of the mixture of art and music that we have come to expect from this vital and dedicated group of young artists. They’ve got it going.