By Wing Young Huie

The centerpiece of The University Avenue Project was a spectacular outdoor projection site where dual outdoor photographic slide shows were projected nightly on billboard-sized screens in a former car dealership lot, accompanied by prerecorded soundtracks by local musicians. Once a month we held live cabaret shows at the site that featured many of the musicians as well as performances by dancers, spoken word artists, filmmakers by amateurs and professionals from the surrounding neighborhoods.

This reclaimed urban space became a town square that attracted thousands of viewers from all walks of life during the six-month span of the installation. After the completion of UAP in October 2010 I started thinking about taking some of the concepts of the projection site and incorporating them into a new gallery space.

After a year search I moved my gallery last May (2011) to a larger space on an urban corner in South Minneapolis that had a dubious reputation, in a building that hadn’t been occupied for 47 years (I had had a photography gallery in a middle-class neighborhood for nine years). I decided to call it The Third Place.

The third place is a term used in the concept of community building to refer to social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments of home and the workplace. The “first place” is the home and those that one lives with. The “second place” is the workplace – where people may actually spend most of their time. Third places, then, are “anchors” of community life and facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction.

Every month we host communal events with artists or thinkers from various mediums who perform or present their work, engage in a salon-style discussion with the audience, followed by ping pong and karaoke. The event is free ($5 – 10 suggested donation). So far we’ve had a renowned poet, a documentary filmmaker, an American Studies professor who released his first music CD, abstract painters, a neighborhood gathering in response to a stabbing death that occurred right outside the gallery, a puppet and performance artist, and a dialogue between a sociologist and myself on the intersection of documentary photography and sociology.

The Third Place is in many ways an extension of The University Avenue Project, and furthers the participatory concepts of my past projects by encouraging playful engagement in redefined spaces that become part theater, town square, and rec room, acting as a community catalyst.