Amid new struggles in Durham’s creative industries, these owners share innovative approaches and collaborative efforts that support the local arts and retail scene while fostering community engagement
By Anna-Rhesa Versola | Photo by John Michael Simpson
Go ahead, book those tickets to hear your favorite band at Motorco Music Hall or see an experimental dance performance at The Fruit. Maybe decide to buy that special piece of art or treat a loved one to a nice meal before an exhibit at 5 Points Gallery or Horse & Buggy Press. Every dollar counts toward Durham’s creative economy.
Analysis of business data shows an upward trend for arts and entertainment returning to pre-pandemic levels. Hotel occupancy rates last year were at 66.2% compared to 75.1% in 2019. In the same time frame, there were 9.3 million visits to the city compared to the pre-COVID 10.5 million visits. This year’s State of Downtown Durham report said: “We know that these small, independent businesses continue to struggle with challenges out of their control – higher labor and supply [and] operating and business costs, a reduction in weekday traffic and an uncertain market – yet these owners continue to show up and share their passion and craft with all of Durham and the entire region.”
We spoke with four arts-based business owners about how they make things work in today’s local arts and culture landscape.
Develop a Clear Vision
A train rumbled along the tracks that cross South Dillard Street. Its whistle pierced the air before the gates lifted, allowing cars to pass in front of an industrial warehouse built in 1926 as a distribution center for fruit and produce. Today it’s known as The Fruit, and owner Tim Walter re-imagines how he can use the 22,000-square-foot space in ways that can sustain profitability while fulfilling its mission to support the local community.
Walter said he balances large, revenue-generating events like reunions and large parties – a one-night booking could generate $10,000 in sales and fees, plus sales tax and tips – with The Fruit’s goal of supporting visual and performing artists with smaller budgets, like the venue did through its collaborations with Duke Performances (now Duke Arts Presents). “They bring world-class musicians and ethnic diversity …” Walter said. “DP told us that, with our support, they could do programs that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.”
Walter, 60, was born and raised in Durham. He earned a bachelor’s degree in public policy and philosophy at Duke University, and a master’s in business administration from Yale University. His career began with direct services for farmworkers and refugees, then community economic development work through a think tank and a large group of charitable foundations. He returned to Durham to care for his parents, and saw an opportunity in 2014 to establish a place for the next generation of creatives to experiment, play and discover pathways to careers that offer more than just a paycheck.
“I talked with a lot of visual artists, electronic music artists and other performance artists,” Walter said. “And it became clear that Durham did not have something that was like a Brooklyn-style or a Berlin-style rough space that artists love. Anybody can renovate a building and make it look cool. The idea was to put the basic infrastructure in place, and not put a design aesthetic on it, but to let the artists come in to create that, so they always have a raw space to play with.”
In Walter’s view, creative entrepreneurship and community-driven growth is an ideal pairing that is more successful using a bottom up approach rather than top down. “When you say community economic development, you start with the people who live here in Durham,” Walter said, adding that the types of jobs and opportunity can affect the degree of improvement to neighborhoods and infrastructure. “The light you bring into the region has [to have] that population in mind first.”
The pandemic shutdown left few options for The Fruit, and Walter was forced to drain his own savings to keep his business open. “I was losing my mind for two years,” he said, laughing. “I always thought that I would make more money doing something else like philanthropy consulting, go work for Fidelity or whatever, but this … this is really fun.”
The flexibility of the building allows Walter to set up for something like a quilt exhibit during the day and then convert the same space into a pulsing, techno rave setting at night. A theater group can perform on stage at one end of the warehouse while a private jazz event happens simultaneously at the opposite end. “The place is always different,” Walter said. “That recipe of having different ethnicities, different economic classes of people mixing and mingling together is part of the mission of The Fruit.”
Walter hopes his hometown will give creative, commercial enterprises like his a chance to thrive. “I’m less interested in making a legacy,” he said. “I’m more interested in making a life that is part of the community and is fun and rich with creatives.”
Embrace Ingenuity
5 Points Gallery owner and fused-glass artist Teddy Devereux said the gallery pulled through recent challenges thanks to a combination of financial assistance (a landlord who subsidized part of the rent, a grant from the Durham Arts Council) and recent purchases from larger entities like the City of Durham and a local business that bought art for its offices.
5 Points is a collective of nine contemporary artists who share in the rent, maintenance costs and work shifts for the space. Three of the member artists also work on press releases, social media posts and newsletters about Durham’s Third Friday Art Walk. Their website is updated monthly to show current and upcoming exhibits and artist news. All their efforts drive visitors and potential buyers into the gallery space because most of their business is done in person in front of the artwork.
“We are always discussing how to get more businesses to purchase local art,” Devereux said. The gallery’s mission is to form meaningful connections and dialogue with the community of art lovers, local businesses, organizations and collectors. “I love to engage with visitors to the gallery, especially when they are often interested in how I create my artwork,” Devereux said. She gives tours, and on occasion offers one-on-one free glass-making sessions at her home-based studio as another way to draw attention to her work.
Create New Revenue Streams
Motorco Music Hall manager Jeremy Roth admits he practices “aggressively conservative bookkeeping” to hang on to any savings. When the pandemic hit, those savings helped his businesses pull through the crisis, and having a diversified enterprise kept him in business.
“The thing that ultimately pays our bills is our restaurant, Parts&Labor,” he said. Roth hopes that the addition of The Veranda, a new covered patio where food and beverages will be served, will further define Motorco as an entertainment destination. “We don’t struggle to always have some kind of event in the Showroom like we did when we first opened as strictly a venue back in 2010,” he said. “The restaurant and its patio sustain the overall business and, in turn, when we do have an event in the Showroom, many of those patrons enjoy a meal at Parts&Labor.”
Marketing and audience engagement are more challenging. “We struggle with this, and we’re mostly left relying on email and social media,” he said, adding that Motorco occasionally advertises on the radio and regularly distributes posters, sometimes as far as Greensboro. “The battle is always to get out in front of the, ‘Oh, man! My favorite band played at Motorco last night and I missed it!’” Roth said. “That s*** is our nightmare, and I still hear it all the time.”
Running a venue and restaurant offers Roth endless opportunities to solve problems: “I am constantly working on 12 different projects (accounting, fixing various broken things, plumbing, dealing with the [point of sales], building furniture, developing our website, writing scripts to manage invoices and inventory, cleaning floors, making juice, etc.),” he said.
Define Your Niche
Horse & Buggy Press owner Dave Wofford is a publication designer who specializes in book projects. He’s been in business since 1996, first in a former washboard factory in Raleigh and then in different locations in Durham. Wofford is a one-man shop and works on a wide assortment of projects, like the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, currently in hiatus.
“People come to me because they want a more beautifully designed book with higher production values and a more collaborative process,” Wofford said. “I specialize in helping tailor the solution to what people need, as opposed to just working on the same type of projects over and over.”
To sustain his business, Wofford applies three rates – corporate, educational/ nonprofit and individual. “Car mechanics charge $125 an hour, so why shouldn’t creative people be charging that much?” he said. “I just need to have enough work in the door to pay rent and live in a city that’s [becoming] increasingly more expensive.”
When he’s not printing works, Wofford curates a light-filled, 500-square-foot gallery space at the front of his building on Broad Street. Exhibits, which usually last two months, feature a range of media representing work from up to 40 different artists and makers. “Everybody is from the Southeast, and probably three-quarters of the folks are from North Carolina,” Wofford said. He often holds receptions as doubleheaders with nearby Craven Allen Gallery. He still sometimes misses the dedicated, 1,500-square-foot gallery he launched just weeks before COVID-19; more than a year later, he was forced to close PS118 on Parrish Street.
“It just seemed like the air came out of downtown Durham,” Wofford said about how the pandemic changed people’s behaviors. Today, Wofford continues to adapt to market shifts. He uses digital and social media resources to reach out to current and potential audiences yet still relies on the tried-but-true method of word-of-mouth recommendations, which seems fitting for someone whose unofficial motto is “sparking joy in conversation.”
In keeping with his intentions to collaborate with others, Wofford said he’s looking forward to working on more memoir books, which are becoming more popular to do. “As the world changes so much and so rapidly, I think it’s important for people to share their life’s lessons,” Wofford said.
