Renew Newcastle recently featured on ABC TV's Sunday Arts program.
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For more information or to download the fulll program visit the Sunday Arts web site.
Sikhouse Art Projects
Renew Newcastle will open a new round of projects on Saturday 13 June 2009, starting at 4pm. Join us in Newcastle’s Hunter Street Mall for a tour of the projects led by Renew Newcastle founder, some time ABC TV presenter, and This Is Not Art festival founder Marcus Westbury. Meet us in the middle of the Hunter St Mall in front of Market Square.
This group of creative projects includes an exhibition and retail space presenting sustainable “upcycled” art and design objects; a fine metalwork, leather and stone jewellery workshop; a millinery design workshop; an artist run gallery space for emerging visual artists; a collectively run retail store selling local hand made children’s clothes, household objects, jewellery and accessories; a local surf photography gallery and retail space; and a large scale sculptural installation gallery.
These new enterprises add to the stable of 19 projects which Renew Newcastle has placed in 12 empty shops and offices to date. Come along to meet the artists who are involved and see how they are invigorating the city.
Renew Newcastle is also pleased to introduce a free wi-fi service for the Mall area. We have partnered with local ISP Ipera to introduce a free wireless internet service, enabling our temporary projects to access internet without having to establish broadband or telephone contracts, and enables visitors to the city the convenience of free internet access.
Stick around after the tour for exhibition openings in two new gallery spaces from 5pm. Roll up your sleeves and (literally) help the artist unveil her large scale installation work at the opening of Penny Thwaite’s exhibition in the Silk House Art Projects. And join the Arthive collective with a sneak preview of their artist run gallery space, showing off their collection of works on brown paper bags.
Renew Newcastle Projects Launch Date: Saturday 13 June 2009 Time: 4.00pm – 5.00pm, followed by exhibition openings from 5.00pm Location: Hunter St Mall, entrance to Market Square, in front of the pedestrian overpass We’d love to see you there!
Renew Newcastle founder Marcus Westbury and board member Craig Allchin will be part of a panel discussion as part of the Creative Sydney festival on the "Upsides of Downturns." Details are below but for more information visit the Creative Sydney web site. If you're in Sydney come along and say hi!
UPSIDES OF DOWNTURNS
Thursday June 11, 6pm – 7:30pm Venue: Museum Of Contemporary Art
What are the creative opportunities of tough economic times? Positive thinkers from across the creative industries reveal the silver linings, question our new values and discuss how to adapt to change. Presented in association with Vibewire Youth Inc.
With: Marcus Westbury (Renew Newcastle), Craig Allchin (Six Degrees Architects), Ross Dawson, Joe Snell (DARCH), Rosie Fischer (Imperial Panda Festival), Andrew Ramadge (Mess and Noise), Nicholas Pickard (Sun Herald and Crikey).
For those of you interested in putting in a project proposal to Renew Newcastle, we have revised and updated our guidelines. We will now be moving to a system of regular deadlines rather than a constantly rolling call. It makes it easier for us to publicise and administer applicaitons.
If you are interested in putting in an application we have created a new application form process, updated our guidelines and FAQs and gnerally tightened up our process from the back-of-an-envelope one we rolled out last year.
For all the information see the "Propose a project" section of this site.
If you have submitted in the past we would strongly advise you to take a good look at the new guidelines and FAQs and resubmit under the new system. We are keeping old applications on file but if we are not already actively working with you to find a space it would be best to resubmit.
It may also make it much clearer what we are looking for if you visit our project page for more on what we've been up to already.
Renew Newcastle -- and particularly the folks at The Clinic -- have been featured over at the web site of Inside Out magazine.
From the article:
Vacant shopfronts and rundown buildings can become a visual obituary for a town. Resparking the landscape doesn't need to be a budget-draining, showy affair though – moving in artists until the properties are commercially attractive again is a smart, inspired way to deal with unused spaces that might otherwise be left to ruin. Such a scheme also makes studios and retail fronts affordable for creative types. All this is currently happening in Newcastle, NSW.
Renew Newcastle's legal advisor Rod Smith is also a member of Newcastle based band Firekites. This is their new clip for ''Autumn Story'' which debuted on Rage last night and landed the coveted ''Indie clip of the week'.
The clip literally took Yanni Kronenberg and Lucinda Schreiber 6 months to produce. It's a completely hand drawn chalk board animation and it's awesome!
Renew Newcastle finally has some funding! It means we are no longer paying for everything with volunteer labour, overdrawn credit cards and dubious IOUs. We'd like to thank the Newcastle City Centre Committee and Arts NSW for getting on board and backing us.
The even better news is that the arrival of money means that we now have our first paid staff member. Marni Jackson has been appointed as Renew Newcastle's first General Manager. Some of you may know her from her previous role as Renew Newcastle's most over-enthusiastic and over-commited Newcastle based volunteer (that's Marni on the left above back cleaning out one of our first empty shop spaces) or from her previous life as the Manager of the This Is Not Art festival.
We couldn't have found a better candidate.
We've been busy behind the scenes at Renew Newcastle. Having successfully opened our first group of projects in February, we've been working behind the scenes to place a whole new group of creative initiatives in more of Newcastle's vacant buildings.
In May expect to see a whole new suite of active shopfronts, stores and studios opening. These buildings and others will be transformed into artist studios and galleries, milliners, clothes designers, a surf photographer and a shop for furniture, bags and other items made entirely from recycled materials.
Stay tuned.
Renew Newcastle has attracted a lot of attention for our innovative use of the web, social networking and "crowdsourcing" to develop ideas and involve the community in the development of the project. We have had a facebook group and a web presence long before we had a project, an organisation or any empty shops. The American web site Cooltown studios recently wrote about our use of facebook and we've been featured in places as far apart as Japan and Catalonia in Spain as the result of our online activities.
Today we think we've achieved our most significant internet milestone of all! The Renew Newcastle Facebook group has officially clocked over to the Newcastle postcode. We have 2300 members supporting renewing Newcastle 2300 and growing by the day. Given the size of Newcastle we think that's pretty impressive.
Renew Newcastle has been the subject of a major story on 1233 ABC Newcastle:
For visitors to the Hunter Street Mall for many years there have been increasingly fewer reasons to go there, as many stores pulled down the shutters and migrated to the bigger suburban centres. What the Newcastle CBD needs, business advocates have said, is a specialty retail experience that compliments the city's natural assets - open air shopping, the beaches and the harbour. Now, ironically, it looks like being the glut of vacant shops that could turn out to be the saviour of the run down shopping precinct.
