Corsicana diaries The art of the small town

The town Creative types are finding a haven in Corsicana, but can its charm survive?

The visionary 100W founder saw potential in derelict building

The concept Artist residency programs and the art of making art

The town An artists’ haven is born Creative types are finding a haven in Corsicana, but can its charm survive? An artist from southwestern England walks into an all-American diner in Corsicana. He sits at a table near the back with his guide, a 28-year-old Dallas artist named Kyle Hobratschk. Eva makes prints with a vintage ink plotter and is in town to study American patterns. The place is called Across the Street Diner, because the owner, Jimmy Hale, bought the building after opening a salon across the street. For years, it was the oldest continuously operating soda fountain west of the Mississippi, Hobratschk says. “Soda fountain?” Eva asks.

This is his first visit to the U.S., and so far he’s only had a brief visit to Dallas and two weeks in Corsicana. He has lots to learn about Americana, and where better than a retro diner dripping with nostalgia and greasy patty melts? Patrons at the Across the Street Diner in downtown Corsicana. (Photograph by Nan Coulter/Special Contributor)

Eva is one of about two dozen national and international artists who have passed through Corsicana in the last few months as part of 100W, Hobratschk’s new residency program. From Iceland and Scotland, Chicago and Baltimore, they’ve come to this conservative corner of old-time Texas to get away from the big city, slow down and create art. What they find here, just 50 minutes from bustling Dallas, is a place with plenty of space and few interruptions. It started with a handful of Dallas artists and writers coming to visit but has turned into a full-blown happening here in Corsicana, and it’s got some people asking — and only partly in jest: Is this becoming the new Marfa? “When we were trying to do something, everybody agreed it starts with artists,” said Hale, who helped build up downtown’s economic core. “That’s just part of the evolution of Corsicana.” Corsicana was once a dusty downtown with empty storefronts, but is now coming to life again with new and revitalized work spaces. Leave the historic downtown district and there’s still widespread poverty. Newcomers are still learning to coexist with lifelong residents. Slowly but surely, though, Corsicana is becoming — to everyone’s surprise — cool. Clearing the weeds On the ground floor of one of Hale’s buildings downtown are two prints from historic Corsicana. One shows a rig spouting thick black oil in the middle of a cotton field. It shows where Corsicana has been. Hale leans in close to point out the workers picking cotton in the hot Southern sun. He’s been there, too. He was born a sharecropper in northern Mississippi, and his job as a child was to carry buckets of water to the middle of the field for break time. One day, when looking out over the cotton crop, he pointed out to another worker how picturesque it all was. The rolling fields, the black dirt punctuated with green crop and tufts of white. Those will all become beautiful shirts one day, he said. His friend, however, pointed to a nearby field full of weeds they had to clear. What would be beautiful, he said, is if someone could discover a way to make shirts from those weeds instead, so they wouldn’t have to work. “I never looked at anything the same after that,” Hale said. “That has changed how I see the world.” Just a few years ago, downtown Corsicana was like that field of weeds. “You could fire a cannon down the street and not hit anybody,” Hale said. The other print on the ground floor of Hale’s newly remodeled building is a panoramic shot of downtown Corsicana in 1923. Every parking spot is filled. The sidewalks are full of shoppers, the streets bustling with traffic. It shows what Corsicana could be again.

Hale and a few other investors have begun to buy up buildings and refurbish them into desirable work and retail space. There’s Hale’s multiple office buildings, salon and Across the Street Diner and Bistro. There’s Mita’s Coffee Lab, a cafe straight out of Brooklyn with reclaimed wood and filament-bulb lighting. And there’s the artists, congregating on the north end of downtown in a new smattering of studio spaces. Patrons place their orders at the Brooklyn-esque Mita’s Coffee Lab in downtown Corsicana. (Photograph by Nan Coulter/Special Contributor)

Sara Beth Wilson, tourism and Main Street director for the city, said she regularly gets calls about people wanting to buy real estate downtown, but lately she’s had to turn them away. Nothing is available. “The [open] buildings down here are few and far between,” Wilson said. “In the past two years I’ve been here, it’s grown tremendously.” Art in odd places Outside just about every storefront downtown sits a yellow A-frame sign with a black chalkboard and white lettering: “SHOP CORSICANA.” Some advertise daily specials, others sit unused. Hobratschk and one of his friends from Dallas made the signs for business owners when they first moved to Corsicana. The project allowed the artists to meet their new neighbors and get to know the downtown community, Hobratschk said. “We’re not invasive,” he said. “Going to the grocery is easy, going to the post office is easy, so we can just concentrate on our work.”

Hobratschk’s main project in town — and his largest investment in the city’s future — is 100W, an artist- and writer-residency program that conveniently sits at 100 W. Third Ave. The program operates out of the old Independent Order of Odd Fellows building. A classic car parks outside 100W, an artist residency program housed in the former Independent Order of the Odd Fellows building in downtown Corsicana. (Photograph courtesy Kyle Hobratschk)

“I was super intimidated by it, I still am. This place is a monster,” Hobratschk said. “It already has and will continue to inform my work.” The cavernous building is mostly quiet during the day. Artists and writers move in and out, usually spending only about six weeks in Corsicana, making Pinto Bean, Hobratschk’s feisty Chihuahua, the building’s longest resident. Across the street is the studio of Nancy Rebal and her husband, David Searcy, an artist-and-writer pair from Dallas. Before Hobratschk opened the IOOF building to short-term artists, Rebal rented the third floor. When she first visited the city years ago, Rebal hated it. Too Podunk, too rural, not enough was happening. But today, she says, she finds Corsicana a perfect getaway from the metropolitan tempo of Dallas. Yet part of Corsicana’s appeal for most of the creative people moving there is its proximity to the big city. Only about 50 minutes down I-45, international artists are able to easily commute to downtown to show their work in Dallas galleries. “This is one NPR program away from the city,” Rebal said. “I can stay four or five days before I have to go back.” The soda fountain and painted pianos found dotted through downtown are just a few examples of Corsicana's legacy of americana and quirky, small town charm. (Photographs by Nan Coulter/Special Contributor) The changes in Corsicana come as a double-edged sword, however. Everyone here knows that they need attention and money to outgrow the traditional, tired facade of small-town Texas. But change the city too much and it will lose its charm. “We’re here just to be here and make things, not to offend anybody or confront anybody,” Rebal said. “That’s something I don’t want to have happen to Corsicana is to have Dallas imposed on it.” Constant change Corsicana owes its name to José Antonio Navarro, Tejano leader of the Texas Revolution. He was behind Navarro County, which was created by the newly admitted state’s Legislature in 1846. Its county seat was established two years later, with a name that Navarro suggested to honor his father’s homeland of Corsica. Wolf Brand Chili started here in the 1890s, when Lyman T. Davis sold bowls for 5 cents apiece out of the back of a wagon on the corner where Across the Street Diner sits. A German immigrant began making fruitcakes around the same time and founded Collin Street Bakery — today nationally famous, and the subject of a 2015 Texas Monthly story following an embezzlement scandal at the bakery. Corsicana was largely insulated from the worst effects of the Great Depression by its investment in oil. (Photo via the Edward L. Williams historical postcard collection) In 1894, a company drilling artesian wells accidentally struck oil. It was the first large-scale oil deposit discovered west of the Mississippi. By 1898, when Hobratschk’s IOOF building was built, the Corsicana oil field had 287 wells producing 544,620 barrels annually. The boom brought overwhelming prosperity to the town. Electric streetlights and streetcars were installed. The Texas Electric Railroad added hourly service to Dallas in 1913. Huge homes were built. Saloons and other businesses prospered. But the old guard still tried to hold on to the sleepy-town image as best as possible. In 1919, Magnolia Petroleum Co. wanted to build two 29-story towers in downtown Corsicana with a skybridge connection. City leaders said no. Downtown Dallas would later say yes. Oil did protect Corsicana from the worst effects of the Great Depression, but the city began to dry up in the 1960s. Bethlehem Steel left town when the city denied the company tax breaks, and the middle class left with it. Population has steadily grown, but the downtown core wasted away for decades. Downtown Corsicana consists of a main business district along Beaton Street, where 100W and the other new businesses have begun to pop up on brick-lined streets. Around every corner is an antique shop and a church. The city is by no means idyllic. Last year, Corsicana was the scene of large protests against mass deportation arrests, and the town remains radically segregated by race and income. Drive into town from the east and you’ll see run-down trailers and black residents. Drive west of downtown and you’ll see two- and three-story plantation-style homes with Mercedes in the driveway in the mostly white neighborhood.

Even the newcomers have to face unpleasant inequity. Hobratschk said that once, while jogging in the black neighborhood near downtown, people shouted at him to “remember what side of the tracks you’re on.” Drone view of a train passing through Corsicana. (Footage courtesy Benjamin Hines)

The IOOF building that is now used to house artists was briefly a Ku Klux Klan meeting space, Hobratschk said, and the group’s banners were still in the building when he bought it in 2012. “You don’t go where things are fine, you go where you can make things better,” Rebal said. “I really think there’s redemption.” Banners left behind by the Odd Fellows in what is now 100W, an artist- and writer-in-residency community. (Photograph by Nan Coulter/Special Contributor) ‘Father Corsicana’ One of the first nights Edmund Eva, the Englishman, stayed in Corsicana, Hobratschk took the 100W artists to the home of one of their biggest supporters, Joe Brooks. The menu: chicken with green beans, potato salad and homemade peach cobbler. “Peach cobbler?” Eva asked. “I’ve only heard of it on television.” Joe B. Brooks, also called “Father Corsicana,” photographed at home with his dog, Frasier. (Photograph by Nan Coulter/Special Contributor) Hobratschk calls Brooks “Father Corsicana.” In the 1970s, he was involved with the first efforts to boost arts in the city. He founded the Navarro Council for the Arts and helped raise money to refurbish The Palace, a 1921 vaudeville theater that brings in B-list country and Opry acts today. Brooks just celebrated his 81st birthday, and the retired school principal now splits his time between Corsicana and Santa Fe. He regularly hosts dinners for the 100W guests and others in town, where he’s able to foster connections between locals and the visiting artists. He takes an active role in supporting the newcomers at 100W, even as the arts council hasn’t embraced Hobratschk and company in the same way. The arts council is more focused on arts education in Navarro County schools than producing or displaying art these days, Brooks said. “It makes no sense,” he said. “I’m an old educator, so I get doing it for the kids, but there are adults with artistic talent that need to be nurtured.” In his study at home, Brooks keeps a caricature someone made of him back when he was helping start the arts council. The character is pulling a wagon full of statues and art and historic buildings that Brooks tried to save. He directed plays, made costumes, designed set pieces, raised money, planned parks, organized, inspired and kept pushing Corsicana forward. “It was really an outreach in those early days. I think it’s sad we don’t do that now,” Brooks said. “The marriage is available; people just have to look beyond the immediate.” Jimmy Hale helped change the cultural landscape of downtown Corsicana, with investments in several businesses, including the Across the Street Diner. (Photograph by Nan Coulter/Special Contributor) That’s not to say the new artists have ignored local art, however. One of the 100W artists worked with a local theater group to paint backdrops for their performances. David Searcy and Nancy Rebal have worked with a local undiscovered artist, Wayne Hall, to show his work and profile him in The Paris Review. “A seed that’s planted but not nurtured is not going to blossom,” Brooks said. “That’s the kind of commitment you want. You’re not doing it for the money. You’re doing it for growth, not personal reward.” Yes, things are changing in Corsicana. Hollywood movie crews are coming in to capture its bucolic charm. For every dusty antique store that still sits on Beaton Street, there’s a storefront under construction for a new business or studio moving in. Brooks calls it a “renaissance.” That makes people like Jimmy Hale excited, but nervous. Standing on a corner downtown, just a block from his diner and bistro, he looks around. Out-of-towners are walking the street, browsing from shop to shop. A steady stream of vehicles passes down Beaton; all kinds of people are coming and going. It’s starting to look like that 1923 panorama again. “My biggest fear is we’re going to have so many people in five to 10 years that it won’t be a sleepy old town anymore,” he said, his voice starting to shake. “It’s like I’m killing the thing I love.” Hale turns suddenly and crosses the street, making sure to look both ways for the oncoming traffic moving down Beaton.


The visionary Room, with a muse For artist Kyle Hobratschk, a derelict building in a quiet town was the perfect place to find creative inspiration. Now he’s sharing it with other artists Something began vibrating inside of him the moment he walked inside. He studied the patina of the walls, the way the plaster had eroded over time with its stubborn, clinging bits of paint. He felt excitement and a kind of loneliness. Only it wasn’t the sad kind, but rather the promise of being alone with one’s thoughts and the work at hand. Yes, it was just an old building — ornate, three stories tall, regal even in its neglect with brick cornices and cast-stone arched windows. Its vast, decrepit rooms washed in slanting beams of sunlight welcomed him like an embrace. Kyle Hobratschk transformed a decrepit old building into sundrenched studio spaces and sumply furnished living quarters for his artists-in-residence at 100W. (LEFT: Photograph by Nan Coulter/Special Contributor, RIGHT: Photograph courtesy Kyle Hobratschk) Kyle Hobratschk knew this was a place he could make art. He was 23, a year out of Southern Methodist University art school. He had lingered like a stray dog at the campus studio and workshop as long as he could that summer. He needed his own space. By chance, an artist who had signed up for the printmaking class he taught in north Oak Cliff, Nancy Rebal, told him about this vacant building in Corsicana where her friends once lived. He had never heard of the town and had to consult a map. Appy to be a 100W resident 100 West grants artists and writers residencies to create work in this historic building repurposed for studio space. Large scale, light filled rooms are provided alongside complete living accommodations and wood shop access to produce work in two or three dimension, installation, or writing. The 2017 residency application deadline is Sept. 15, 2016.



More information about 100W Soon afterward, he stood on the sleepy downtown corner of West Third Avenue and Beaton Street and saw his future. That was 2012. He did not know the building would make him a better artist. He did not know it would teach him about the best and worst people are capable of. It would change him, though. It would help change a town. “Derelict,” was how Hobratschk’s friend, Kiernan Lofland, described the building when Hobratschk showed it to him. The two had met via SMU’s art program; another friend of theirs, Travis LaMothe, understood right away when he saw the iPhone photos: “As sculptors, space is a material.” By the time LaMothe finally made the trip down to see it, Hobratschk revealed on the front sidewalk that he had bought the building. He had never owned property before. Hobratschk had cobbled together a bank loan and promises from his artist friends to either invest sweat equity into making the cavernous place usable or rent space there. He had only the vaguest idea about creating a kind of art haven at this point. Rebal, the artist who first told him about the building, and her husband, writer David Searcy, later became the first tenants. (The building had belonged to their friend, the late Texas artist Doug MacWithey.) They set up camp essentially on the third floor. Searcy wrote an essay featuring Corsicana for his recent book, Shame and Wonder. Artist-writer couple Nancy Rebal and David Searcy, the first occupants of 100W. (Photograph by Nan Coulter/Special Contributor) The following are excerpts from David Searcy’s essay “Nameless”, part of his most current work, Shame and Wonder, which describes Doug McWhithey, his late friend, who at one time owned the old Odd Fellows lodge, the silent magic of Corsicana and the building that is now 100W. How can I make this mean what it should? I will insist at least on meaning of some broad, unspecified sort. To get it started. I read somewhere – and I’m sure it came from some exalted source – that the study of Torah is so virtuous beyond all other virtues, that a gentile, even a gentile, who applies himself brings immeasurable joy to God. So here we go. My friend, the artist Doug MacWithey, owned a huge, historic, three-story former Odd Fellows hall in Corsicana, Texas. Though the scale of his work was usually rather small, he was inspired by these immense old spaces, loved, as much as anything, the sense of grand necessity, the fitting out, in this case, of the upper floors – their great high windows looking, from the corner, east and south along the main street – with these massively timbered ten-foot working tables of the kind that might, a hundred years before in similar vast, unheated rooms, have supported ranks of grim industrial sewing machines or grommet punches or something manned, as it were, by ghostly, sad-faced women. And although the big ideas that might have needed ten-foot tables never quite got into gear, and as his work, in fact, reduced to narrowing views of a very narrow field of interest, he required, all the more I think, all that expansiveness for reasons I was unable to appreciate (we had a running joke about the Disney character Goofy carving a toothpick from a tree), or fully appreciate at least, until after his death. I think such spaces meant to him a kind of endlessness. Historical and physical. Whatever concentrated, pared-away-to-almost-nothing bit of art he did, he wanted to be endless. As if nothingness and endlessness depended on each other. Even some isolated scribble would, in principle, in his heart, belong to an endless series endlessly elucidating endless variations on its faint, essential self. And when, as toward the end of his life, a single thought took hold, he’d go with it, he’d crank it out (most times with a little xerographic help) with no intention of ever shutting down until some practicality, like death of course, intruded. This is why he loved the xerox machine as well, I am convinced – less for the time saved copying patterns, than for the endlessness implied. How it suggested art might be cranked out forever automatically, might heap right up to the ceiling, spill from the windows, fill the street with blowing handbills bearing glimpses, advertisements, of the truth. Some sort of truth. You can’t escape it, can’t ignore it in a little town like that. All of a sudden here it comes, the blessed truth, right down the middle of the street. - - - The Odd Fellows hall is sold to a bright young artist friend of Nancy’s. And pretty soon he’s got this sort of atelier, this sort of residency going – weavers, painters, sculptors coming from Dallas, renting space, a communal kitchen. Ground floor woodshop. Nancy rents the whole third floor. At last a place removed from practical constraints where she can set her giant canvases like sails. I come to visit when I can. Her bright young artist friend, Kyle Hobratschk, comes and goes, as do the others. In the mornings it’s just me and Nancy usually. Making coffee in the kitchen on the second floor. Doug’s kitchen. Karan’s kitchen. Coffee and donuts in what used to be Doug’s studio, windows open, propped with 2X4’s, the sounds of trains and voices. And this little stapled pamphlet Kyle picked up from the Visitor Center. “Walking Tour of Historic Downtown Corsicana.” On page four, the tale of the wandering Jewish rope walker. Good Lord, Nancy, listen to this. At dusk, if no one’s down there working, I’ll descend to the second floor and stand for a while in the southeast corner where Doug usually spent his spare time. With windows open on two sides. There is a Main Street, but the real main street is Beaton Street which runs along the east side of the building. From the south side’s east-most window – right behind Doug as he worked – you get the best view straight down Beaton. If it weren’t for the trees, not here of course in 1884, you’d see to the Collin Street intersection, which the rope walker tried to cross. From the southeast corner at Collin and Beaton to the northwest, I believe. Doug, at his table, would have been facing away. But were the windows open, as they probably would have been, he would have turned at the sudden silence, then the cries. What had he missed? A vision, surely. Nothing real. But something meaningful, I think. I have decided. continue reading The couple would later buy the former Mombassa nightclub building across the street, dismantle its garish front sign with glee and remake it into their studio and residence. Hobratschk would leave them a bottle of champagne and glasses on closing day. Hobratschk vastly underestimated how much work the building needed. “It was borderline haunted, very damp. There were leaks in the roof,” he recalls. It was also magical. The 1898 structure was an original Odd Fellows lodge, meaning it has a specific, mystically inspired floorplan. The Independent Order of Odd Fellows building, which used to host Ku Klux Klan meetings and has been transformed into an artist residency program, pictued in downtown Corsicana in 1910. (Photograph courtesy Kyle Hobratschk) “There’s a lot of theory and special ritualistic reasons for why certain rooms are the way they are,” Hobratschk says. “So the third floor has a sacred sense to it because that’s where the Odd Fellows fraternity met.” The artists are drawn to this space, too. Sculptural chairs crafted by artist and 100W founder Kyle Hobratschk. (Photograph by Nan Coulter/Special Contributor) The building had, at times, previously hosted Ku Klux Klan meetings and the Jewish Community Center. The ground level, with its storefront windows and cement floors, was typically rented out for income. The first tenant ran a meat market there. The last one before Hobratschk bought the place was a survivalist who sold Vietnam War memorabilia online. He kept an inoperable vintage Porsche painted in camouflage colors parked in the window. Hobratschk and the collective of founding artists for this project — whatever it would become — turned the ground floor into a wood shop to service the building. They used it then, as they do now, to make whatever they needed, from missing trim pieces to functional tables. Hobratschk also makes sculptural chairs, something he’d done in Dallas along with printmaking and painting. The artists’ first big triumph was buying a vintage three-quarter-ton industrial table saw that was trucked in on a flatbed trailer. It was so heavy that Hobratschk and his friends couldn’t figure out how to unload it. A guy named Danny watching from the NAPA Auto Parts store across the street walked over and told them what to do. While restoring the old, decrepit Odd Fellows lodge building, Kyle Hobratschk and his artist friends forged lasting friendships with the townspeople of Corsicana. LEFT: Corsicana florist Tom Adams in the living space above his downtown shop. (Photograph by Nan Coulter/Special Contributor); RIGHT: Kiernan Lofland directs his friend and 100W founder Kyle Hobratschk (pictured driving) as they unload a vintage industrial table saw. (Photo courtesy Kyle Hobratschk) The group began making other connections, then friendships, in the town. Tom Adams owns the flower shop in the quaint brick building on the opposite corner. He loves to host cocktail parties for the artists in his extravagantly decorated living quarters above his shop. Hobratschk especially loved the night they had piña coladas and Bugles corn snacks served in crystal goblets paired with red onion dipping sauce. Hobratschk made the ultimate friend around this time. A stray brown Chihuahua who refused to leave his side. He was annoyed at first, then relented. He named her Pinto Bean. Kyle Hobratschk with his Chihuahua Pinto Bean. (Photograph by Nan Coulter/Special Contributor) Grandiose ideas soon softened with harsh realities. The building isn’t air-conditioned and the days can be long, dusty and hot. On the third floor, Hobratschk built a narrow, wooden spiral staircase to the attic. Pop open a square hatch in the roof and you can climb the ladder to the flat roof and have a sprawling view of downtown Corsicana. The artists have come to love this roof. They will often sleep up there at night because it’s cooler than the stifling rooms below in late summer. Plus, there are the stars. Or inky storm clouds. In the mornings, Hobratschk brings his breakfast up here. He will watch the sunrise. He will marvel at the colors in the sky and think about how to paint them accurately.

Hobratschk started a detailed journal of the transformation of what they now call 100 West, logging everything: the meals they ate, the construction jobs or art projects completed, his occasional irritations and frustrations with others. Artist- and writer-in-residence Edmund Eva enjoys the sunset and expansive rooftop views of Corsicana. (Photograph courtesy Kyle Hobratschk)

A local man named Timothy Lusk began hanging around the building asking for work. This happens a lot to Hobratschk. He is the kid from Dallas with the kind smile and the Mercedes-Benz whom everyone is curious about. (The car was handed down from his mother, Celeste, a retired architect living with his father in Scottsdale, Ariz. He also drives his grandfather’s Ford pickup still permeated with West Texas red dust.) Lusk was resourceful. He could locate a leveling jack or a 35-foot ladder quickly and for nearly nothing. His truck didn’t run, so Hobratschk often drove him to his family’s house across the railroad tracks in the rougher, predominantly black part of town. Lusk worked hard. He also asked for more money a lot for various — and often outlandish — emergencies. Sometimes it felt like a betrayal to Hobratschk, like he was being taken advantage of. Regardless, the men formed an unlikely bond, a friendship. But then Lusk stopped showing up for work and eventually disappeared. Hobratschk later got a call from Lusk; he was in jail. It has taken almost four years to turn 100 West into what it is today, and it’s still a work in progress. In January, the first official artist residents arrived. They departed just last month, new works in tow. A philosophy is developing. Hobratschk recalled one early contributing artist, Randell Morgan, who stood on the second-floor landing and offered a pronouncement to him and Pinto Bean below. Morgan urged them to keep 100 West rule-less. “There are too many rules out there,” he said, motioning toward the window. That stuck with Hobratschk. He is also spreading his influence beyond the old Odd Fellows building. On a long walk awhile back, Hobratschk fell in love with a pared-down 1888 Queen Anne Victorian on a corner lot. “It feels like an Edward Hopper painting,” he said. Soon after purchasing 100W, Kyle Hobratschk bought and restored a white house near downtown as a less rustic alternative for guests and artists to stay. (Photograph by Nan Coulter/Special Contributor) He bought it and made it a joint labor of love with his mother, Celeste, who quickly took over the project. She had flown down many times to help with his first building. Now she was back to help restore the house, obsessing over finishes, procuring elegant linens. In his journal, Hobratschk noted that her presence lifts the place. She always opens the blinds to flood the house with light, whereas the workers never bother. The white house is now a comfortable place to stay for guests and artists (compared with the more rustic building downtown). Hobratschk crafted the bed frames by hand. Art from the 100 West group is displayed throughout. The detached carriage house out back will be finished by summer. The transient nature of what Hobratschk and his fellow artists have made is both by design and bittersweet. People and artwork will come and go. Living and working at 100W At 100W, residents live, work and play as a creative community. (Photos courtesy Nancy Rebal, Kyle Hobratschk and Benjamin Hines) On the day that LaMothe moved out of the building after his own residency of sorts, Hobratschk found the sudden absence strangely difficult. Even the ordinary objects now gone — an old tool chest, the turquoise Makita coffeemaker — felt like a palpable loss. This is the process of the building. It is not about permanence. He made a note about this in his journal: “It’s designed to accept artists transitionally,” he wrote. “It’s a place to make connections. “To make something and leave something.”

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