About 601 Tully

Check out our new website! 601Tully.syr.edu

601 Tully is a center for engaged practice in Syracuse, NY developed by artist and professor Marion Wilson with a rotating collaborative team of 54 students and neighbors and Anda French of French 2Design. It's a site for meaningful exchange between artists, community members, and scholars in the co-production of culture.

601 Tully includes a contemporary art space, a public events space, a bookstore, a teaching garden, and Recess Cafe West.

In 2009, Wilson purchased the condemned two-story home and local drug hub, and throughout five semesters, Wilson's design/build class re-zoned, designed, renovated and now sustains the physical and programmatic aspects of 601 Tully. The collaborative team has consisted of artists, architects, environmentalists, Fowler High School students, Green Train Workforce, neighbors, and the occasional passerby.

601 Tully is made possible by the generous support of the Syracuse University School of Education, The Kauffman Foundation, The Near West Side Initiative, Imagining America, Home HeadQuarters Inc., Say Yes to Education, and National Grid.

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Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Beauty and Goodness


Public art and architecture share the same domain. They are a dance between adhering to the artist or architect’s personal intentions impulses, and inclinations, and fulfilling the needs of the community the work is being produced for. A balance between the artist/architect’s subjective sense of “beauty,” (lets call this aesthetic and conceptual ‘harmony’) and their understanding of “goodness” (lets say the communally understood aesthetic and conceptual ‘morality’ of the work) is difficult to reach. Often, the agenda of the artist/architect must submit to the communal good, or the community’s agenda must be sacrificed for the artist/architect to retain a sense of identity in their work.
Through my involvement with the 601 Tully project, I have reached a new connection with my community. As a student at Syracuse University, I feel there is a distinct separation between students studying and living here, and the others who inhabit the city. Classes like 601 really help to pull down these illusory walls that separate the University (which actually represents, along with the hospitals, the main revenue stream for the city) and the rest of Syracuse.
With this new sense of inclusion in my community, I find there is a new passion behind the work I produce. It is not just a masturbatory quest to satisfy my creative impulses, it has a communal purpose that reaches toward a greater goodness.

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