The Most Inspiring Art Cities in America

Over the past five years, the most interesting arts attraction in Richmond has become the city itself. In 2012, Shane Pomajambo of Blind Whino SW Arts Club, a nonprofit and gallery in Washington, D.C., brought his month-long showcase of street art, the G40 Art Summit, to the downtown Richmond Arts District. “As I was asking business owners’ permission to use their walls, I kept hearing the same story—that they fell in love with the city’s eclectic, laid-back vibe but wanted more feet in the street,” he recalls. In response, he partnered with the city to produce more works, with the aim of “enforcing the district as a place to see arts.” Today, the Richmond Mural Project is an annual event, responsible for the largest collection of murals in the country. Pomajambo picks ten international muralists, like Polish duo Etam Cru, to spend two weeks every year adorning the city with artwork. Now, he says, “I’ve seen people do bike tours, photo shoots, and meetups around the murals.”

New Orleans may be best known for its food and music scene, but lately it’s become a capital of contemporary art, thanks in part to the city’s sweeping arts triennial, Prospect New Orleans. The fourth iteration, which runs from November 18 to February 25, will feature a knockout contribution by artist Kara Walker: a steam-organ installation along the Mississippi River at Algiers Point, where slaves were kept in quarantine in the 1800s. It will join works from 73 other artists, many addressing local issues, such as Tables Rising, a sculpture at Crescent Park by artist Jennifer Odem that illustrates the threat of elevated sea levels.

The citywide fair will draw visitors to institutions such as the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, as well as venues in more recently developed parts of town, like the Bywater’s St. Claude Arts District, which revolves around the arts collective Antenna. Formed just before Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, to promote art and literature, the group expanded after the storm and now runs a nonprofit gallery showing underexposed artists as well as outreach programs, including a youth creative-writing initiative. “In dealing with environmental precocity, political corruption, and segregated institutions, the people of New Orleans have had to be collaborative, creative, and scrappy,” says artist and activist Imani Brown, Antenna’s director of programs.

“This is a diamond in the rough,” says artist Juan R. Gutiérrez, founder of the Stencil Network collective, describing the arts scene exploding in Santurce, a barrio in the northeastern part of the capital that’s just a 15-minute drive from Old San Juan. When he was growing up, Santurce was seen, he says, as “the new city built around the old city,” but it devolved into a slum as residents moved to suburbs, and by the 1990s, crime had surged, with drug gangs dominating large blocks of public housing.

Then, around 2009, a small group of young San Juaneros, hoping to establish a new arts center—Old San Juan once held that title but became too crowded and expensive—began transforming Santurce with spray-painted murals, ironic bars (like the barber-themed El Bar Bero, on Calle Loíza), and edgy art venues. Today, the heart of Santurce is Calle Cerra, an eight-block stretch of street art and artist-run galleries. One of the first to open was C787 Studios (734 Calle Cerra), an experimental art and music space that debuted an immersive installation by muralist duo KiiK Create late last year. A short walk north, La Productora mounts thought-provoking pieces by up-and-comers like local street artist Juan Fernández. Back around the corner, on Calle Cerra, Recinto Cerra (787-239-3040) holds exhibits of international artists, including Belgian painter Patrick Urbain.

C787’s director, Angel Alexis Bousquet, is also the founder of Santurce es Ley, an annual arts festival that started in 2010 and has since become a blockbuster showcase of indie music, art installations, open studios, and playful murals by artists like Puerto Rico–born Bik Ismo. In June, MECA brought together more than 30 exhibitors to promote the sale of works by Caribbean artists. “Santurce has a special magic,” says street artist Damaris Cruz, who participated in Santurce es Ley in 2014. “It’s the new hipster town.”

House Lannister and House Targaryen are not only the cornerstones of arguably the most popular show on television but are also permanent fixtures of our cultural consciousness.

But what about the House of Eternal Return? Self-described as an “interactive art experience” set in a disused bowling alley, the House of Eternal Return is the first permanent interdisciplinary canvas by the decade-old Meow Wolf arts collective, and one of the latest attractions in New Mexico’s capital to bolster its City Different moniker. As it turns out, Meow Wolf has become one of fantasy writer George R. R. Martin’s greatest investments, if not his loudest claim to fame. (That little thing called Game of Thrones is likely to retain that title.) Martin became what you might call the project’s angel investor after his former employee Vince Kadlubek coaxed him into purchasing an abandoned strip mall in 2016 and sinking a significant amount of cash into its transformation. “It’s Myst meets Peewee’s Playhouse,” says Kadlubek, one of the collective’s founders, who hopes the exhibit will serve as a tangible link between the city and its emerging generation of artists.

A loose narrative ties the interactive art attraction together as it unfolds across the 20,000-square-foot space. It’s the story of a quaint Victorian manse whose owners, the Selig family, have mysteriously disappeared. The house itself has become trapped in a rupture of the space-time continuum, unleashing a wonderland of oddities. Visitors climb into the refrigerator to find a cavern of musical bones, then fall through a washing machine to track down a forest of glowworms. Some engage in intense investigation, piecing together clues to the missing family’s whereabouts. Others give in to the more visceral enjoyment of the flickering sights and bonking sounds that wash over guests in a kind of psychedelic fog. “It’s like Stranger Things in here!” a girl remarked to a friend during my visit, as she rummaged under a bed for another trans-dimensional conduit.

It not only attracts a parade of tourists and repeat locals but has also turned a once sleepy area into what Kadlubek hopes will be a “midtown innovation district.” That would give Santa Fe an alternative art center to adobe-clad Canyon Road, which is thought to be the densest cluster of galleries in the United States.

Down the road is another hub that’s helping to bend the city’s art scene away from its colonial core. Following a 14-month renovation, Site Santa Fe reopens this month with a form-follows-function design, spearheaded by Shop Architects, that promises to be an artistic expression unto itself as well as a blank slate for international artists to decorate. In 1995, the museum hosted the U.S.’s first international biennial for contemporary art. Chief curator Irene Hofmann doesn’t necessarily have experiential art on the brain, but it inevitably creeps in. The debut exhibition, “Future Shock,” examines the human condition under the pressure of accelerating change and includes Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Zoom Pavilion, which explores the idea of privacy (or lack thereof) in the digital age.

Earlier this year, the gaping Santa Fe Opera—a marvel of interactive art and architecture on its own—headlined its summer season with the world debut of The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, a synth-symphonic tour de force that’s heading to Seattle next year.

Meow Wolf too is poised to take some of its hometown art on the road. According to Kadlubek, the collective plans to resurrect The Due Return—a boat-shaped precursor to its current permanent interactive art exhibit—in the very near future. Like Homer’s Odyssey on an acid trip, the roving installation is a ship filled to the brim with relics garnered from alien worlds after plumbing the depths of an alternate dimension. Maybe some artifacts will be from Westeros. But for now, visitors can wipe their feet on the “Beyond Here, There Be Dragons” doormat leading into the House of Eternal Return—a quiet nod of gratitude to Meow Wolf ’s angel investor and a reminder of Santa Fe’s ever shifting and expanding artistic boundaries. —Brandon Presser

Centered around the city’s Penn Station, Baltimore’s Station North Arts and Entertainment District revitalized an area that had declined along with the local economy in the second half of the past century. Now, “in about 16 years, it has gone from being nearly 75 percent vacant to one of the city’s most thriving districts,” says Stewart Watson, executive director of Area 405, a gallery that opened in 2003.

The district grew around the gallery as empty industrial properties were repurposed to create the Baltimore Design School and two City Arts developments of low-income live-work spaces for artists. Area 405’s building now houses Station North Tool Library, one of the country’s most successful tool-lending programs, and nearby are wood and metal shops, 3-D printing and textile studios, and an electronics lab at the new Open Works.

The neighborhood is also home to such galleries as SpaceCamp, Guest Spot at the Reinstitute, and Motor House studio. Nearby, Luis Rosenfeld, of Graffiti Alley, oversees Graffiti Warehouse, where, he says, “anyone can come to view, take pictures, or make their mark,” taking part in the area’s transformation.

The Rhode Island School of Design is more than a training ground for visual artists—it’s also the glue that binds Providence’s thriving arts scene. RISD graduates have transformed the once decaying postindustrial city into a vibrant cultural hub by turning old mill buildings into must-see art venues in the West End and Olneyville neighborhoods and the adjacent town of Pawtucket.

It started in 2001, when designer-entrepreneur Nick Bauta decided not to join the exodus of RISD alums to New York and instead stayed in Providence to repurpose a vacated steel mill into a center for industrial arts. Along with spaces for metalworking, blacksmithing, and ceramics, the Steel Yard is home to Public Projects, an initiative that has collaborated with more than 250 local artists and other makers to produce site-specific public sculptures, including bike racks, tree guards, and benches.

A decade later, anticipating the desire for a local live-music scene, Bauta partnered with Brown University alum Don King to open Fête Music Hall, now the area’s go-to for big-name acts. Other RISD alums are doing their part too, getting involved with ventures that include Yellow Peril Gallery and AS220. Events such as PVDFest, founded in 2015 as an annual arts celebration, showcase talent like award-winning slam poet Christopher Johnson and vertical-dance pioneers Bandaloop.

“Jackson’s cultural traditions, from blues to art, are about the self-made,” says Julian Rankin, director of art and public exchange at the Mississippi Museum of Art. “What’s happening in the city now is a continuation of that.” He’s referring to an influx of young artists from all over the South who are settling in Midtown, north of the city center. Rankin describes the neighborhood as an “intergenerational and multiracial” area that declined in the ’80s, when a lack of employment options and poor infrastructure led families to move. Trailblazing artist Andrew Young has been running Pearl River Glass Studio, one of the country’s top stained-glass makers, there since 1975, but only in the past decade have transplants begun opening the artist-run spaces that now define the district. The newest venues include And Gallery, which focuses on sociopolitical issues, and OffBeat, a record store–gallery that primarily shows minority artists.

“Public art gives Chicagoans and visitors an opportunity to see the city through the artist’s eyes,” says Mayor Rahm Emanuel, explaining why the city commissioned local artists to create murals and sculptures in all 50 of its wards in 2017. Chicago’s Year of Public Art will culminate in a monthlong festival this month. It’s all part of the city’s $1 million investment in artist-led community projects, including One Summer Chicago, a paid-internship program in which local youths assist artists and organizations—perhaps inspiring the next generation of Chicago artists.

When it opened in Beacon, in 2003, in an old factory, Dia:Beacon became an example of how a single institution can ignite a whole region, especially one that starts a few miles north of Manhattan. A 150-mile stretch along the river, the Hudson Valley has been an enclave for creatives ever since the Hudson River school movement in the 19th century, but it wasn’t until recently that the area established itself as an arts pilgrimage spot. In the town of Hudson, 70 miles north of Beacon, musician Melissa Auf der Maur launched Basilica Hudson in 2010, an arts center turned nonprofit. Next came New York transplants like gallerist Jeff Bailey’s contemporary-arts space and curator Kristen Dodge’s September Gallery on Hudson’s Warren Street. Just across the river, in Catskill, Etsy founder Rob Kalin opened crafts workshop Catskill Mill in 2013, and this June, Magazzino Italian Art, a museum of postwar Italian art, debuted in Cold Spring, near Beacon.

Although the narrative for D.C. artists for many years was that you had to go somewhere else to make it, a lot of us really want to stay here,” says filmmaker Dawne Langford, founder of Quota, a D.C.-based nomadic art collective. With individual artists priced out of the city’s real estate market, groups are banding together to split rent on studio space, share much-needed resources, and take on advocacy and activist roles in the country’s political center.

At Quota, Langford is known for her ability to pair ground-up initiatives with venues. For example, she has been collaborating with the Fundred Dollar Bill Project, a national campaign against lead toxicity, to launch “The Fundred Reserve,” which displayed thousands of hand-drawn interpretations of $100 bills at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design. The show, which ran through May, included contributions from children at 46 local schools.

The tiny but mighty nonprofit gallery Transformer has been jump-starting the careers of artists since 2002 and will auction 150-plus Artworks that will be on auction at Transformer’s annual Silent Auction and Benefit Party artworks on November 18 at its annual Silent Auction and Benefit Party, where half of the proceeds will benefit participating artists. The gallery often collaborates with NoMüNoMü (josephorzal.com), a civic-minded collective run by artists Joseph Orzal and Nora Müeller, to produce events such as last spring’s Now More Than Ever, a discussion series on how current governmental policies may affect local issues.

Then there’s No Kings Collective, which, in partnership with Fivesquares Development, debuted a 30,000-square-foot mural and pop-up performance space, the Lot at the Liz, this summer at Whitman-Walker Health’s downtown Elizabeth Taylor Medical Center. The space celebrates the LGBTQ community, which the center has long supported. Up next: two murals for The Wharf, a new mixed-used space on the Washington Channel.

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