West Side Wonder

Some college courses result in a term paper. Some finish with an exam. The more involved classes require a completed project. Students in Syracuse University associate professor Marion Wilson’s social sculpture class, however, have spent 2 years transforming a two-story drug hub on Syracuse’s Near West Side into a multifunctional community center for art and education. It sure beats the hell out of multiple choice.

Wilson’s project took shape in the abandoned drug house at 601 Tully St. starting in late 2009. As a tribute to its surrounding neighborhood, the gallery was named “601 Tully” after its street address. Wilson and her students spent months developing a vision for the community center and, along with members of the neighborhood’s GreenTrain group, brought that vision to life. The completely renovated building is now home to a community garden, artist gallery and workspace, and an after-school program for students in the surrounding neighborhood.

Each semester over the past 2 years Wilson’s class has undertaken a different facet of the overwhelming project. Early classes obtained proper zoning from the city and developed a business plan. In subsequent semesters, they held focus groups with neighbors, gathered wood and materials, created the garden outside and undertook renovations including un-barricading the boarded-up doors and windows and laying new floorboards.

Wherever possible, the students used recycled materials to complete the project. “All the seating was made by the students,” Wilson says. “The benches upstairs are old beams from the Lincoln Supply building.”

Currently, students in Wilson’s class are curating the gallery—which opened June 2011—and working on arranging new artists-in-residence to continue crafting the building. As a work of art itself, the building will never truly be finished, Wilson says.

John Cardone is a senior creative writing student at SU working on a minor in sculpture. He has been taking Wilson’s class since it began in 2010; it’s one of those unusual classes that is assigned a different course number each semester, and focuses on different projects.

“This isn’t just an academic exercise for us,” Cardone says of the project. “It’s real work with a real outcome so students get very invested. It’s more time-consuming than most classes but it’s worth it.”

The current artist-in-residence is Zeke Leonard, who reveals his ongoing project to the public at a ceremony on Thursday, April 5, at 7 p.m. Leonard, an artist and full-time professor of interior design at SU’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, is in the process of transforming 601 Tully’s narrow stairwell into a functioning musical instrument using a series of pegs, knobs and strings.

“We wanted to create an instrument that could be played sometimes,” he says. “Not an annoying chime on a doorknob that rings every time someone walks through the door.”

Leonard’s background designing furniture and theater sets inspired his affinity for using found objects to create functional art. Seeking to minimize waste wherever possible, Leonard proves one man’s trash is, in this case, another’s pleasure. He spends 10 to 12 hours a week at 601 Tully, laboring away most afternoons and weekends to complete the project.

Other projects in the works for Leonard include developing workshops that teach community members to build guitars out of cigar boxes and broom handles—something he’s been doing as a hobby for a while. “I want to make good-sounding instruments for no money using found objects,” he says. “People shouldn’t have to spend a thousand dollars to be able to make great music.”