In an alternate universe, Shira Lane is still a Sacramento artist who hasn’t connected with the Sacramento city creatively.
Until the city launched the “Creative Economy” grant program over the summer, Lane, a documentary filmmaker, lived here but didn’t intellectually play here. While she had physically moved – reluctantly at first – to Sacramento two years ago, her video production work remained in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Six months later, she spent the final week of 2017 showing artists around a 38,000-square-foot office building near the Sacramento State campus. She has reached a deal with the landlord to turn a portion of the building into “Upcycle Pop Lab,” a shared workspace for other creatives looking for connection and a desk to call their own.
“I’m trying to find out what people can pay and reverse engineer it,” said Lane, as she showed three prospective tenants the spacious 7300 Folsom Boulevard office building, which in mid-December hosted her UpcyclePOP, a temporary (or pop-up) market selling art, furniture, fashion and furnishings made from existing materials.
The three days of UPcyclePOP attracted hundreds of people as more than a dozen local artists displayed and sold their works, from end tables made from car pistons to televisions with the appearance of old tube sets to ash trays turned into beautiful windows. Prior to the event, she knew none of the artists.
Lane, 41, said she had passed through Sacramento on the way to the Burning Man festival from her then-home in Marin County, but she’d never considered moving here until her partner took a Capitol job.
“I didn’t want to move to Sacramento; I was scared,” said the Australian native, explaining that California’s capital is the least-populated place she has lived. Read the full Article here