Bringing a rainbow assortment of Post-it notes, duct tape and mannequins, an uncanny amount of color will brighten the dreary Case Supply Building in downtown Syracuse.

All the color is part of the second annual Salt City Urban Art and Craft Market. The market opens at 10 a.m. on Saturday. The one-day event will feature three live musical acts, three food vendors and 39 booths featuring local artists from Central New York.

The Salt City Urban Art and Craft Market was started by Syracuse locals Briana Kohlbrenner and Vanessa Rose. Collaborating with Syracuse University, Kohlbrenner and Rose want the arts fair to be edgier than the typical craft market.

‘I think a lot of people get confused about what it is,’ said Rose, an organizer and co-founder of the market. ‘They think it’s just another arts and crafts show. We’re really looking for something edgier, something more urban, something that people haven’t seen as much.’

The building, which is at 112 Wyoming St., has space for 40 booths. Over 90 artists initially applied to have their works featured this year, a number greater than last year when the organizers were having trouble finding a space, Rose said.

‘There are a lot of empty storefronts in Syracuse, but trying to get a hold of doing something with them is not easy,’ Rose said. ‘It’s sad.’

After securing the space last year, Kohlbrenner and Rose vacuumed the dust off of the entire warehouse floor with a store-bought Shop-Vac and a few friends. This year, they knocked a wall down to make more room. Using only a $250 private donation and the $40 fee from each artist, Kohlbrenner and Rose have managed to keep the event free of charge. With the exception of SU-subsidized space, they operate independently.

Rose, a fourth grade teacher in the Fayetteville-Manlius School District, met Kohlbrenner while working on a Syracuse One Take Super-8 film event. Kohlbrenner owns and operates Craft Chemistry, a Syracuse-based art gallery, studio lab and retail store. Rose and Kohlbrenner started the market as an outlet for artists to expose and hopefully sell their work.

In mid-2009, the then-nonexistent market found recourse in the Near Westside Initiative. The initiative recently backed the Love-Letter Bridges art project, a series of paintings on Syracuse highways and overpasses with lines like ‘fall leaves, winter longs,’ and ‘nothing to do, is everything with you.’ The initiative is dedicated to promoting community involvement and artistic growth in the Westside neighborhood, said Near Westside Director Marten Jacobs. The Near Westside Initiative is funded and run by SU’s Office of Community Engagement and Economic Development.

Jacobs met Rose and Kohlbrenner through 40 Below, another community involvement initiative in Central New York. After working with them on 40 Below and helping find a space for Craft Chemistry, Jacobs helped finance their latest endeavor. The building is being used for single-day events, like the arts fair, until it becomes the new home of Syracuse’s public access television station, WCNY, he said.

‘If it wasn’t for the university putting the money and the manpower into these projects, some of them would never have happened,’ Rose said. ‘But on the same note, the university tends to get its hands in everything.’

SU is the main resource of many Syracuse art and community projects, Jacobs said.

‘I think in an ideal world, it’s not Syracuse University’s responsibility. The city of Syracuse should deal more with this stuff, too,’ he said. ‘I’m just happy SU can pick up the slack, but I think there’s a real need to keep pushing the city to make economic investments in the arts.’

For Rose and Kohlbrenner, the important thing is not the money but the involvement.

‘I do get worried about everything becoming property of the university,’ she said. ‘Some of the SU projects have these grand schemes, but I live in Syracuse, I want to make them happen.’

epvilasb@syr.edu

Published on October 20, 2010 at 12:00 pm