Don’t DIY, DIT (Do It Together)

When I had finished my MFA degree at OCAD U in 2015, there seemed to me a dearth of curatorial jobs in Toronto. At least, I found none that offered appropriate compensation or were free of institutional “drama,” recent or longstanding. No opportunity seemed to promise wide-ranging creative autonomy or the ability to take curatorial risks to produce critically-engaged programming. Right out of graduating, my search for this shooting star happened to also align with the city’s exponentially increasing rental prices for both residential and commercial spaces.

I’m writing this in hopes that sharing some of my personal experience starting two DIY (do-it-yourself) spaces will help motivate the creation of more such enterprises. Although very arduous and labour-intensive to manifest, these spaces are the bodies of water that buoy artistic culture. In no way does my opinion aim to present anything but an opinion as to how these spaces have potentially changed and continue to grow outside of the scope of what is commonly experienced via institutional or commercial means.

DIY art spaces have always propagated a critical mass of artistic activity, somehow still sprouting up despite the suffocating concrete pour of neoliberal capitalism onto Toronto’s contemporary art scene. In this economic reality, myself and other friends came together and attempted to find the most economically-friendly approach to creating a DIY art space: a nomadic physical structure that would manifest the experimental curatorial production of site-specific installations. The programming could be responsive and would hopefully add to the city’s DIY art culture.

How could we realistically start a new gallery space with virtually no capital or investment from grants, private sources, or other institutions? At first, the situation seemed dire, but we found a seemingly perfect solution. The shipping container existed as a purchasable pre-fab “structure” that, while primarily used to transport goods globally, could be renovated into a gallery space offering a funny comment on the cohesions of economic trade and contemporary art. Our plan was to use my savings to purchase the container outright with the thought that, however long this lasts, the resell price for shipping containers would at least not drastically drop in the near future. All we needed to buy were building materials for walls, a floor, and some lighting. The entire space was 20’ by 8’. How hard could it be?

My own curatorial projects were carried out between 2017 until around now, operating in Toronto (Bunker 2) and Columbus, OH (Ministry of Culture & Tourism). In my experience, creating a new space in an urban center with a critical mass of arts communities is an incredible excuse to get to know local artists, understand how each scene “works,” and learn about what space (if any) would be valuable to local communities, among other perks of DIY-ing it. There’s no rulebook to explain how this should be done, and there are an infinite amount of ways to do it; that’s the beauty and the curse. To try and define any set of essential elements shared between the countless DIY initiatives (both successful and not) feels like a futile attempt. However, there are struggles common to them all, including my own: a lack of funding, stability, or an assured future. I hope that by detailing a few of the ways I tried (and the many times I failed) to overcome these challenges, it can help impart something that makes your life easier in trying to start one of these things.

Successful DIY funding models represent endless examples of independent, ingenious sustainability methods that have helped keep the lights on: event fundraising, various arts/culture services, art sales, grant funding, institutional parent funding, personal financing, skill sharing, membership, art swapping, venue rental, framing/shipping services, art storage, and more. In adopting a non-normative funding system, these spaces can also operate outside of several funding restrictions (such as long delays or the necessity of applying with a non-profit status) determined by official funders. This helps allow a DIY space to be responsive to contemporary issues at a faster pace than large institutions.

Just as wages have stagnated while the cost of living has increased over the past 50 years, arts funding has become a pittance of an economic injection to help sustain arts institutions. Requiring overly bureaucratic procedures to gatekeep an increasingly miniscule amount of earmarked funds for creative arts, public arts funding has also lagged in its ability to keep up with current accessibility standards and often seems to require a PhD in grant writing. More and more, both new and old art spaces require some hybrid type of private/public funding model in order to financially exist.

In my experience, DIY art spaces exist in a constantly uncomfortable economic reality. Without the economic capital common to larger institutions and private business, how can a space renovate up to building codes? Or offer standard compensation agreed upon from artists and invited cultural producers? Or pay the space organizers for their ongoing labor? Or the gallery sitters for the weekends? How do you keep the lights running?

Inevitably, then, much of the creative labor engendered by DIY spaces–the work shown in garage galleries, the paintings made in classes at somebody’s house–often exists and dies without any “official” history found in public record or institutional histories. Gregory Sholette calls this the “dark matter” of the art world, the work of artists operating outside of the spotlight of the mainstream that populate almost all of what people consider “artistic production.” The DIY art spaces are themselves no different.    

Often, self-funded and -created cultural platforms require an adaptive approach. They cannot and do not erase an available site into a “white cube” but rather take a location’s idiosyncrasies as potential collaborative materials to be incorporated within programming and exhibition.

Among other things, DIY art spaces help catalyze new creative production existing outside traditional art platforms. They forecast divergent futures of novel, radical, and/or otherwise yet-to-be supported creative production not yet subsumed by institutional appetites. However, what may be the most valuable resources captured and shared by these spaces is the overflow of cultural production that, until that point, ceased to exist in that time and place. Although unfortunately and most likely eventually lost within aforementioned dark matter nether, DIY spaces yield something even more important than documented historical archive: adding new venues for cultural experience in which local community can be built, shared, and engaged with. For all intents and purposes, successful DIY art spaces can be understood as one of the most responsive ways to materialize a communal or collective surplus of local creative production. Many of these spaces exist to serve their different communities because of the abundance of arts enthusiasts who can support and sustain them.

There always seems to be some falter in the long-term execution of these spaces. Whether related to funding models, site-specificity, ongoing turnover, or the myriad of other all-too-common problems that emerge, DIY art spaces have difficulty relaying a moment of public enthusiasm for  their initial arrival on the scene into an ongoing, equitable, and well-run organization. Often created by an individual or group of individuals whose goal is exhibition and not financial gain, the spaces therefore require more sweat equity to balance the lack of economic support.

The need for DIY spaces becomes more glaring every day. As urban centers continue to push out creative communities, the cities themselves start to artistically molt, shedding the skin that made it an enviable place for art-space making, now resembling an uncanny but obviously corporatized identity. Although Toronto was already undergoing this process earlier than I can recall, the pandemic and current inflation recently combined to make the situation even more dire. When starting my first space with my other fellow DIY-ers, one of the most important lessons I learnt was the value of the local community. Bunker 2 was not possible without the collective effort from my family, friends, strangers, and peers, nor would it have had any success without willing artists and curators. Although you can spend as much money, time, and energy on doing it yourself, the public that shares creative interests is the most important factor for sustainability.

Although there always existed a respectable arts and culture community in Toronto, it became increasingly clear that a lack of spaces existed when compared to the incredible and increasing amount of dynamic cultural production happening. There exists a critical mass of creative energy, but prohibitive living costs combined with lack of available, affordable, rentable space continue to make DIY-ing it extremely difficult.

One of the lessons learnt along the way is the necessity to find a different funding model than what was prevalent in the city. Instead of renting a building each month, an initial investment of a few thousand dollars (which you can get back if you re-sell) for a shipping container meant that rent each month was just a parking spot fee. Think of this as similar to buying the building in which the art gallery is housed, and then only paying around $100 a month for rent. This way, I was able to keep operational costs very low, to only a parking lot fee, which I paid unless others were willing to chip in if they had the financial stability that month (which turns out is quite frequently if your rent share is only around $50 a month).

However, that’s not considering what may be one of the most unique things about Canada: a nationally-recognized fee structure that is supposed to provide minimum compensation amounts for artists, art writers, filmmakers, and other cultural producers when engaging in an art project, publication, artist events, etc. Paying artist fees needs to also be taken into consideration when attempting to create a DIY space. Of course, if you have just begun a venture with little capital and no stashed-away grant money, paying something like artist fees on top of all the other expenses may seem like a pipedream. I wouldn’t recommend getting too down on yourself about this, though, because sometimes even larger organizations such as BlackFlash compensate me below what CARFAC’s per-word minimum rate would be.

In order to get just operations funding, I’ve seen far too many local Toronto art spaces fund themselves through a similar but “Toronto-ized” version of this “membership” model that crowdsources rent and other costs each month. We were lucky enough to have our operating costs near nothing each month, but the many smaller DIY galleries that began and continue to sprout are on the hook for commercial real estate rent and all those legal stipulations in the 47-page contract. While affording all the great amenities like a bathroom, legally-qualified and installed electrical, and other frivolities, this model breeds a sort of economic gatekeeping mentality, ensuring that only artists who have enough financial freedom to donate what is likely hundreds of dollars a month, to join a gallery team that, as operating costs increase, therefore must also increase the cost to each member (and with Toronto’s speculative/booming commercial real estate market, that increase is also often sudden and sharp). Essentially, only artists with enough additional income have the opportunity to profit culturally, socially, and economically as part of the space.

In the USA, I continued to strive to find a different model for the contemporary art exhibition space. After locating an appropriate venue (new-built warehouse) and signing a lease, the buildout to construct several artist studios began. Putting my savings into a term lease wasn’t easy, but I had a plan. In order to fund this venture, several artist studios were built within part of the space. The rental income from these studios kept the space afloat, while the remaining  half of the space was used as a non-profit (or negative profit) gallery.

The entire buildout was done by myself and, of course, my father Robert Kyba, who came down to help put up 10’ walls, cladding, and over 300’ of metal studs. Doing all the construction kept costs very, very low, needing only cheap(ish) building materials and some simple tools. I won’t say it was “fun,” but in order to do something with a shoestring budget, the buildout needed to get creative. You can do this too! Watching 10-minute construction videos taught me 90% of what I needed, and the rest I learnt through chats with friends and family. Although I don’t recommend it, learning electrician and plumbing skills (also from YouTube) greatly helped in lowering costs because no external help was hired.

Another important lesson learnt was that in order to continue, I needed to be extremely nimble when it came to artists renting space. Although each signed a lease, way too many artists would back out, forget to pay, or leave entirely without letting me know. All of these potential roadblocks exacerbated the anxiety and instability that is so common with DIY spaces. Having separate plans for sustainability if (when) disaster strikes would have gone a long way.

Along with issues with renting, in both projects I tore my hair out trying to keep the spaces at an appropriate environment for artworks. Leaks, shoddy wiring, cracked floors, and AC/heat were all things that eventually needed to be repaired or fixed. When creating a DIY space, I urge you to take a very close look at what renovations may be needed in a day, month, and year. These problems tend to get bigger as they stay unfixed.

One final lesson I’ve learnt is that as a DIY-er, you are always trying to spread the word in as many ways as possible. The good and bad news is that there are countless ways of outreach. Since we exist in an insular world wholly disconnected from regular life, gaining popularity and exposure comes down to a lot of thankless work and a little luck. One of Toronto’s old DIY spaces had an exponential growth in audience when the music artist Skrillex posted a photo of their space while visiting Toronto. For both spaces I helped start, I and/or my team would be doing local studio visits and attending all the art events we could. While very difficult to quantify, the value of networking, social media outreach, and a little virality (who doesn’t like something new and weird in their city?) was enough to spread the word across both cities. All in all, without a robust marketing budget, you’ll need to be innovative to have people lend you their eyes and ears.

All DIY art spaces respond in some way to the cultural, political, and economic contemporary realities around them. These spaces grow where the conditions are fertile: lower cost of living, space availability, critical mass of local arts and culture producers, and accessibility (not to mention the importance of an online presence) are now commonly needed in order to also sustain growth or survive. Often, these spaces act as creative conduits, attempting to showcase the creative labour of artistic production that cannot find a home within established venues. DIY art spaces offer a pure look into what creative communities value, instead of what an institution directs one to value.

Frankly, the need for physical space is now almost moot, when there are so many successful contemporary art galleries that have either fully jumped ship from brick and mortar into the deep end of the digital ocean or are in the process of getting their feet wet through an increasing amalgamation of the two. While the obvious allure of minimal overhead sounds enticing (and necessary during the pandemic), DIY physical spaces offer something rarely done digitally. DIY spaces exist as vital but fleeting moments in time to create new creative networks, learn and engage with cultural production. As we’ve had to unfortunately realize through COVID’s early days, there isn’t a true replacement for in-person and public happenings; the excitement when you walk into a buzzing art opening, the conversations you inadvertently have when someone compliments your platform crocs, bumping into the next curator you’ll show with and accidentally spill white wine onto them (thank god it’s just white wine) or other social interaction. Because let’s be honest, the most important thing about DIY space is the community you can create around it.

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Matthew Kyba is a curator and writer who graduated from OCAD U in 2015 with a Master’s in Criticism and Curatorial Practice.

This article is published in issue 40.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue