- [Bert] It's a little different than the photorealism that most people know, which is kind of stiff and dry and illustrative in a way.

I feel like these, you kind of really feel like you're there or you can sense being there.

I don't put a lot of texture.

I don't want a lot of brush strokes.

The idea is not my hand.

The idea is to take me out of the picture and put you there.

- Bert Crenca is a Rhode Island icon.

As an artist and co-founder of AS220, he helped ignite Providence's art scene in the 1980s.

A one-time rebel, Crenca became part of the local establishment without abandoning his artistic ethos.

But Providence is at a crossroads.

Downtown is quieter than it was before the pandemic and the cheap loft spaces that once attracted artists have vanished.

So what will it take to keep the city's art scene vibrant and does the high cost of living threaten to make Rhode Island's future more bland?

I am Ian Donnis and that's just some of what we talked about in this in-depth conversation.

(somber music) Bert Crenca, welcome to one-on-one.

- Thank you.

I'm happy to be here.

- We're here in your studio, in your home in the north end of Providence.

This is a former Italian-American social club.

I remember when you found this place more than 25 years ago, you called it the last great real estate deal in Providence.

How did you find this spot?

- Well, it was actually friends of mine that found it.

They knew that me and Susan wanted to move our studio out of AS220.

- Susan being your wife.

- Susan being my wife, yeah.

And we came down to take a look at it and the neighbor, one of the Italians that had been here for a long time, he used to sit in the window and he would see the real estate person come in with people and stuff.

And he actually told us what we could probably get away with paying for it.

So we paid $42,000 for this building.

That's 4,000 square feet of space.

Of course, it was a non-functioning building when we got it and we had to bring it up to speed and bring it up to code.

But anyway, yeah, it was a great deal.

- You grew up in the Lymansville section of North Providence.

How did that influence you?

- Well, I was born in Providence and the first couple years of my life we were on Atlas Avenue.

They called good Italians and I was baptized in Holy Ghost Church up in Federal Hill.

And then my father with the GI Bill bought a little house in Lymansville and Lymansville at the time, frankly, when I was young, I didn't know there was anything other than Italians.

I mean, the entire neighborhood was Italians with only a couple of exceptions.

It was great.

In the summer, one guy would come to my house and we'd go to the next house, the next house.

By the time we got to the field, we had enough guys to have a pickup baseball game.

There were religious festivals in the summer that we would go to at the different churches.

And we had the river, we had the (indistinct) Tucker River.

So we had boats and things on the river.

And you know, it was really kind of ideal.

I mean, post 50s white guy, it was good life.

Hula hoop six, transistor radios and all the rest of it.

- You were in the sixth grade when a significant development happened.

You took it as kind of a challenge to create a poster as part of an assignment for your class.

That seems like it was a key thing in putting you on the path to becoming an artist.

Tell me about that.

- You've done your homework.

At that time, my mother was in an institution, a mental institution.

It was a very difficult time for me.

It was a parochial school, so there was between 40 and 50 kids in a class, and I managed to be able to disrupt the whole thing at any given moment by choice.

- You were a bit of a troublemaker.

- I couldn't sit still, you know, and this one nun in the sixth grade was really determined to break me.

And I was in her penance book every day.

And this one time she's walking down the aisle and she's got a book, it's got a little picture of an elf in it.

She walks by me and says, "Well, you wouldn't be interested, but I need somebody to draw this large enough to use as a decoration above the blackboard."

And I say, "Gimme that."

And I took it home and I worked half the night making sure that I did it, and I did it perfect.

And that was really probably one of the first times that I really got challenged to do something artistically.

And from that point on, it was like a bell went off in her head and she just gave me projects all the time to do, which keep me busy.

And yes, that's exactly when the seed, that the potential of being an artist that I might have some interests or skills.

And I didn't really have skills.

I mean, it was something that I got positive reinforcement.

It only takes one person in this world to give you the positive reinforcement to sort of help direct your life.

I mean, I tell that to teachers all the time.

You can be that one person in someone's life.

- But Crenca, let's jump forward to 1982.

By then, you were an artist in Providence, you were showing some art around town.

There was a scathing review of your work in the Providence Journal by Channing Gray.

He wrote, "Using art as a vehicle for social commentary is a risky proposition at best.

The kind of thing that if not handled well, can turn into propaganda."

Maybe he never saw Guernica by Picasso, which was abiding critique of the Nazi regime.

But why did that strike such a chord with you?

- Well first of all, if you read the whole review, it's pretty condemning.

And there was one particular painting that he highlighted in there, and he was a hundred percent correct that it really didn't generate what I had hoped it to generate.

It was trite in a way for something dealing with something that was such a serious issue, which was the Holocaust.

And I think much of the other work stood up and was strong.

That show with Antonio de Soros was not my first, but it was kind of my coming out party.

And I had just went through a divorce and sort of dematerialized.

The house was gone, everything was gone.

We sold all that.

And this is my coming out party, like, okay, I'm gonna be a hundred percent, 100% full-time artist and this is gonna be my life and my first big show, and I get a panning review.

The beauty of that is that a lot of people read that review and came to the show, wanna know what the hell is this.

They talked about the political nature of the work, and it was a panning review.

And it was like, whoa.

'Cause there wasn't that kind of dialogue really going on in Providence very much for or around, or with artists, you know?

Yeah.

- And that had a catalytic effect because you and some other artists wrote a rebuttal to the Providence Journal of Manifesto, and that kind of lit the spark for creating AS220.

- That's absolutely true.

I mean AS220 came about a couple of years later, and there were a bunch of events including an exhibit in Italy that I did that happened in a residency at the New England Center for Contemporary Art.

It was where my thoughts about art and the uncensored and unhurried kind of idea in mission of AS220 was born in that period and was a response to what I had learned and the manifesto.

And much credit to Steve Emma who penned that manifesto.

I mean, we would meet, get together, share ideas.

Steven would go away, write something, come back, we'd read it, we'd critique it, and then eventually it ended up to what it became.

But I owe a lot to Steven, you know, and still we have a friendship.

- How did you develop your belief system that art was more of a philosophy and approach to life rather than a commodity to be bought and sold?

- Well, that's a big question, Ian.

I mean, I think we are all born and with some level of creativity.

It's a survival, it's part of hardwired into us.

It's problem solving.

And yet there still is to some, a large extent, this kind of elitist attitude about art and artists and who has talent and who doesn't have talent.

And for me, that's all bull(bleep).

Anybody can be a productive artist if they choose to and apply themself and work at it.

You know, it's a learned skill.

I don't possess any particular talent.

I just worked at it.

It's a job.

If you put a clock as an artist, meaning you show up in your studio every day, you're a professional.

That's what you do.

Anything other than that, you're an amateur.

Now, I don't even think speaking to it as an amateur is a negative thing, because the meaning of amateur is for the love of it.

You know?

So it's almost a better cost to do it just because you love it.

- To jump into something that's happening right now, we know that costs, housing costs are way up for everyone in Rhode Island.

Other states, we were talking 20 years ago about a squeeze on artists in Providence, how the cheap loft spaces that helped to attract many artists to Providence in the 80s and 90s had increasingly vanished.

How do you see the outlook for maintaining a vibrant arts community in and around Providence?

- I think the housing is a main issue.

It's really bad and it's a desperate situation I think right now.

I meet a lot of young new artists that are coming to town, and they love this place.

I mean, there's a whole generation of young artists that are making things happen.

There's alternative spaces that are bubbled up, and they're continuing to play into the vibrancy that, you know, AS220, the Dirt palace, the (indistinct), all of these other, all these other organizations have contributed to.

But there's a whole new sort of generation of young people that find Providence a great place to be as a young artist, but to struggle to find an affordable place to live.

And that could kill it, not to mention just working families that are having a hard time to find a place to live that's anywhere near affordable.

So I think it's a critical issue, and I think it could destroy what we built here if we don't solve this.

- Speaking of Providence, you've been working for years on a series of paintings.

You call it your Divine Providence series.

These are street scenes, everyday scenes.

Do you go neighborhood by neighborhood?

Do you move around to different neighborhoods?

Tell us a little bit about it.

- Well, the inception of this was something that happened long before AS220 or any of that.

I had done a series of maybe six or seven paintings, very small of Federal Hill when I was living up at Federal Hill.

And those paintings were always bought by one collector, and they wanted to remain anonymous.

I didn't document them, but they've always been my head, these sort of tightly cropped urban landscapes.

And when I finally retired and left AS220 it was like, okay, how am I gonna go forward with my art and everything now that I have this time?

And I remembered that.

I said, you know what?

I think I want to keep loving Providence, right?

'Cause I mean, because to me AS220 was a love letter to the city in a way.

And I started with the first one out the window of my space here, and then started painting this neighborhood.

And then I went to neighborhoods that I have a real personal connection.

Like when my family first immigrated here, they immigrated to Mount Pleasant Chuck Stone Avenue.

So I painted the Mount Pleasant area.

Then now Ian, I've lived in almost every neighborhood in the city.

I lived in South Providence, I lived on Lancaster Street, not exactly the East Side, but I had for a very short time in an apartment in Rogers Park down in that neighborhood.

I lived in Federal Hill.

You know, so I have a personal connection to these neighborhoods in one way or another, either through my work at AS220 or actually living in these neighborhoods.

And it's like I expanded out according to how familiar or how much, how I felt about a particular neighborhood because of my personal connections with it.

And then it just kept expanding and expanding and expanding.

And now we're at 311 paintings.

Can't believe it.

- I've gotta ask you about Buddy Ancy, someone that both of us knew.

He was a huge cheerleader for the city and he appreciated the value of the arts.

But as we know, he also had a problem with corruption.

He supported a bland retail complex that led to the end of Fort Thunder, a real creative incubator.

So do you think he was more negative or positive for Providence in the big scheme?

- Well, I mean, a couple of things.

I mean, what happened to Fort Thunder was inevitable.

I mean, that wasn't gonna last forever.

I mean, I think even Brian has been pretty honest and direct about that.

- Brian Chippendale.

- Yeah.

AS220, I'm not sure that we would've been able to do what we did if we didn't have the support of Buddy.

He could make things happen in a hurry.

And he knew that he wasn't gonna get money from me.

He knew that that wasn't the benefit to our relationship.

- But there was real value.

- But there was value.

And he saw that value.

You know, he had been Mike Van Leason and a couple other people spoke on my behalf, and he helped us identify that building and helped make things happen for us.

Yeah and even monetarily got some money through CDBG grants and things like that to help develop our spaces in our building.

- Community development block grants.

- Yes.

And he never asked me to do anything that made me feel uncomfortable.

I mean, he would ask me to show up at his fundraisers and he would, his person would call me and say, buddy said, don't dress in a suit, dress like an artist, you know?

- Well, you being there made it a cooler event.

- Well, that's hopefully nice of you to say.

I had a lot of meetings where at least the beginning of the meeting, it was just me and him.

So we had some frank conversations.

I mean, I got three letters in my underwear draw from prison from him, so we were corresponding.

- What did he say in those letters?

- It was very reflective.

Like he would talk about how he ended up there and his relationship with people there, that he had, that he could give some of these people legal counsel.

And he worked in the library, didn't hurt.

He did mention one of the letters.

It's great.

I had a good relationship with the black community of Province because it is helped me here.

You know, that his reputation preceded himself in that regard.

And it was reflective, it was very sincere and very interesting, the letters.

I stopped writing him because at the end of the third letter he wrote, "Nobody needs to know that we're corresponding."

And that just wasn't a power move that I was willing to subject myself to.

Because I knew that side of him as well, controlling.

So I stopped corresponding.

- Would it be possible Bert Crenca to create something like AS220 in Providence today?

- I think there are spaces that are happening that are a lot like AS220.

There's auntie's house, I think is one space.

I think that's the name, (indistinct) he has a space.

There's naming people a spaces gets you in trouble 'cause you always forget somebody.

There's a Wilbury theater there where we did a performance.

I mean, there's a whole bunch of, obviously the Dirt Palace and the stuff that they've done.

But there are new spaces.

This is what I'm saying about young people.

Now, what's the long term prognosis for all of these spaces and stuff like that?

Listen, it's yeoman's work to have to make these spaces legal and get 'em on board and be able to sustain them.

But there's a still a lot of vitality in Province in the scene.

There are a lot of young people that are really contributing in meaningful ways.

So I'm not pessimistic about the future, but getting back to that housing thing, man, you gotta find a place to live.

And that combined with food costs and things like that between families and people like artists and young people, it's difficult, So I worry about that.

- AS220 was in two different locations downtown before it settled in its home on Empire Street, which had been a scene of prostitution and drug dealing before.

AS220 really set its roots in the early 90s, AS220 developed other stuff, housing on Washington Street.

And these things help to contribute to the sense of vitality downtown.

But we see since the pandemic, there's less foot traffic downtown.

And it was something of a setback as far as creating an animated downtown.

That's true of a lot of places, not just Providence.

But I wonder if you were Emperor King and you could wave a wand or create change, what would you do to try and bring more vitality to downtown Providence?

- I mean, people have been debating this issue for the last 30 years about how to do this.

And they've tried so many different things on those first floor retail spaces and all of this stuff.

And I think there was some real momentum before the pandemic.

And we have yet to survive.

I mean, my brother had a restaurant for 10 years downtown.

He had to close it.

Nicobellas.

I don't know that I have an answer to this, Ian.

One of the ideas that the developers like Buff and others thought was to make it a living community.

- Buff Chace.

- Yeah.

And that's why they built so many residential spaces, and they're all full.

I mean, all those residential spaces in downtown are full.

I mean, there are not many that are affordable to the average person necessarily I don't think, with the exception of AS220.

I don't know what the solution is.

Art and culture is a tremendous catalyst for change.

But even that, I believe a lot of the art and cultural institutions, and I don't know this intimately, but are struggling right now.

I mean, some of the real foundational organizations in town, it's just very difficult.

- Let me ask you this, Bert, when we've talked in the past, you've pointed to things like the Parthenon or the Coliseum, these antiquities creative things from thousands of years ago and how they continue to bring people to Greece and Italy and so on and so forth.

And it's a value of the drawing power of the arts.

How do you evaluate the current crop of politicians in Rhode Island on their relative amount?

- Okay, couple things.

First, the kind of, what I used to say was like, they built the Acropolis a few thousand years ago and the thing is completely in ruins and it's still making them a lot of money, right?

The same thing with the Coliseum.

There was a point when we were at our peak and a lot of these spaces AS220 and others were happening in the steel yard and all these things, where there was an expectation for a mayor to deliver a cultural platform.

We were organized, we were pressuring politicians and whatnot and the banking community and everybody.

And we were selling the idea that art and culture is a viable catalyst for the revitalization of the city and stuff.

And then there were people like Andreas Dwane or Richard Florida and other people who wrote about this stuff and sort of reinforced that this was a good strategy.

- So if it's good strategy, how are the current crop of politicians- - I don't hear a word from them on arts and culture.

Maybe I'm missing it, I don't hear it.

I think it has slipped back.

I think it's ignorance that there's not, maybe we're lacking the kind of cultural intelligence that I think is required to be able to envision these things, to support these things in ways that make them viable.

We had talked about like an honest trust where monies could be put in and throughout the ecosystem and stuff like that to help make these things sustainable.

There were so many different things that we had proposed and talked about, but we also kind of demanded that the politicians present.

They would present a cultural plan when campaigning.

Like for an example when David was running, David Cicilline was running for office against Joe Paolino.

- [Ian] For Mayor of Providence.

- Yeah.

I had assembled a bunch of people to meet, to put together a list of demands while they were running, right?

- This was 2002.

- Cliff was working for David and he asked- - Cliff Wood?

- Yeah, Cliff Wood.

And he asked me, can I see a copy of what you guys have been producing?

And they used that and incorporated in their cultural presentation and what they were talking about in terms of what they hoped to accomplish.

And then Joe's camp, (indistinct) was working for Joe Paolino and Rudy called me and says, can I get, you know... So we were players in that conversation.

There was an expectation that they were gonna present a plan.

Since then, I just don't think that there's that momentum or that trust that this is a viable strategy, you know?

And it's disappointing to me 'cause we had great momentum.

- Let's do a lightning round.

Some short answers to questions.

- Sure.

(laughs) - Who's your favorite musician?

- Oh, Jesus I don't know how to answer that question.

I mean, people who are inspiring me and not necessarily my favorite musicians, even like Sun Ra or Rahsaan Roland Kirk or people like that that were groundbreakers or Zapper.

You know, I grew up in the 60s, so the Led Zeppelin and the Cream and all of that stuff were prominent in my listening.

- How about a favorite book or author?

- Dusty (indistinct) by far.

- Favorite restaurant.

- Ooh, oh my god, I can't remember the names.

There's a Mexican restaurant in Central Falls that I really love.

A tiny little place and stuff is so good.

The Faux Horn, love Faux Horn.

There's a couple.

And the Indian restaurant in that little mall just over the line in (indistinct) Main Street.

- (indistinct) - Yeah.

- Oh, I love that place.

So those are my favorites.

You know, they cost you (indistinct) you still on the list.

- Let's go back to some longer answers to... - El Chapin is another one.

- Oh yeah, sure.

Media has changed so much in a relatively short period of time.

I mean, the Providence Journal used to have art critics.

There used to be a Providence Phoenix.

Those things are gone, but there's an internet.

The internet can convene people, it can also drive people apart.

How's the rise in the internet and the decline of print media changed the conversation among artists and about art in Providence?

- Having critics is part of the ecosystem.

And we don't have it so much.

Now the internet has been sensational for me.

I almost only post artwork on Facebook and Instagram.

I've made sales, any number of sales, I've gotten commissions as a result of people seeing my work on the internet and stuff like that.

But we don't control who sees it.

We don't control how many people see it, you know, and all of that.

I've built a following, so I do get some exposure.

Art is a cycle.

It's like you come in your studio, you're alone in your studio.

You make your work or your music, whatever kind of art you do, but it's about communication and you gotta get it out there, right?

And that's part of completing the cycle of creation.

And critics played a big role in that, whether I agree with 'em or I don't agree, it doesn't matter.

It's about the dialogue and that is created and the conversation that's created as a result of their critique.

So I think it's sad that we've lost, you know, I mean, you know what's happened with newspapers and stuff like that.

And they can't afford to be in business.

- I've gotta ask you how you think Rhode Island as a whole is doing?

You know, the state has a lot of great things, but the economy has been in turnaround forever.

The public schools they've been trying, talking about improving them forever.

Not a lot has changed.

Channel 12 had a story recently about, we've got the worst roads in the nation.

How do you think the state is doing?

- I was on the school board, the Providence school board.

I got to review a budget that was three inches thick and see where the money goes.

I mean, very few people realize that like private school board budget, I don't know exactly what it is, but it's somewhere around $600 million or better.

The entire budget is only double that for the city.

So half the budget goes to the private school system, then you got fire, then you got police, then you got public works.

What's left?

People have no idea.

That's why I keep insisting on politicians who are running for office.

Like, how you gonna pay for it?

Tell me how you're gonna pay for it.

I've seen these budgets, you know, yeah, there's some waste of course there's waste, but it's not like they're flooded with cash to do the things that people would like to see happen.

The suburbs are a whole nother thing here in the state.

There are still people that perceive Providence as a scary place in the suburbs.

And I don't see Providence getting a whole lot of support in terms of activity from the suburbs.

I'm Providence centric man, and young people still finding this a really cool place to be.

And that's encouraging.

- Alright, we're gonna leave it there.

Burt Crenca thank you so much for sitting down.

- Thank you.

And I can't believe you still find me worthy of a conversation.

- Absolutely worthy.

(group laughing) (upbeat music)