The Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center’s Artist Grant and Residency program, originally funded by short-term pandemic relief funding, will become a permanent program, thanks to funding from the City of Portland and fundraising by a nonprofit committed to revitalizing a center of Portland’s Black culture.

The program provides between $10,000 and $12,000 grants to 16 artists each year, along with a nine-week residency at the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center (IFCC), a former firehouse at 5340 North Interstate Avenue that now houses a 99-seat theater, rehearsal studio, and art gallery. It also provides additional grants to artists who do not need a residency, in amounts between $1,000 to $10,000.

The purpose of the program is to allow Portland-based artists the time, money, and space to advance their artistic practice and careers. In exchange, resident artists are required to give a community performance or host another type of community activity.

The program began in 2022, funded by a $500,000 grant from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), a federal program launched in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic to, in part, support artists and artistic venues affected by the pandemic shutdown.

ARPA funds sunset this March. Rather than end the grant and residency program, Friends of IFCC, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the IFCC, embarked on raising the funds to continue operating it.

In addition to grants and donations, the nonprofit won a $120,000 grant from the City of Portland’s Office of Arts and Culture and a grant from the 1803 Fund, a Black-led philanthropic organization working to revitalize Portland’s Black culture, focusing on Portland’s Albina neighborhood and extending from there: It has also recently partnered with the Portland Art Museum to create a new gallery for Black art and experience at the museum. The business concept for the foundation was prompted by the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

The city’s Parks and Recreation bureau –– which owns the IFCC –– will pay for the building’s operating costs.

To date, 34 artists practicing in multiple disciplines –– including dance, theater, the visual arts, writing, music, and multidisciplinary art –– have received grants and space at IFCC through the program.

“It’s been really amazing to see how it has impacted their professional careers,” Prentice Onayemi, the IFCC’s interim executive director, said.

He said that “space and a chunk of change” has put artists “in energetic conversation with this incredible history of Black excellence” directly connected to the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center.

And, the program –– developed as a short-term solution to find a use for the IFCC’s space while a long-term feasibility study is conducted –– is helping to determine the former firehouse’s future.

“It’s just a particularly exciting moment,” Onayemi said.

The IFCC’s future lies in art

The Artist Grant & Residency Program grew out of a years-long process –– and a long-held dream of Portland’s Black community –– to transform the IFCC into a center for Black arts and culture.    

The IFCC was founded in 1982 by the first African American commissioner to serve on the Portland City Council, Charles Jordan. From 1959 until that point, it had been used as a fire station.

Through the years, the brick building has variously fallen into disuse and disrepair, as well as been the host of organizations that attempted to revive it. For several years, the Vanport Mosaic Festival, a historical and contemporary arts festival inspired by, and memorializing, the 1948 flooding of the City of Vanport, presented much of its programming at IFCC. 

Between 2010 and 2014, Ethos Music Center managed the building. The City of Portland has managed and maintained the building and property since that time.  

In 2018, the city established a Community Advisory Committee to provide input to the city’s Parks and Recreation bureau for future uses of the IFCC and the property. Originally, the committee was meant to meet for eight weeks. Seven years later, rather than be an advisory body, the advisory committee has become integral to planning the building’s future.

“They asked to work in true partnership with the city,” Soo Pak, the Parks and Recreation bureau’s arts, culture, and special events manager, said. “They said, we want to share in power and decision making. They have consistently insisted that we do things differently.”

“IFCC is such an important cultural institution for the Black community it made sense that it be Black-led,” Pak added.

Members of the committee formed Friends of IFCC in 2023 “in order for us to be able to have a paper trail from an advocacy perspective … we actually need an entity that can sign legal documents,” Onayemi said.

Pak said that Friends of the IFCC and the community advisory body have been “integrally involved” in decisions determining the programs the offered at IFCC. “We are in lock step,” Pak said. “We would not have gotten this far without them.”

“Art has a way of dispelling politics,” Antoinette Edwards, a member of Friends of IFCC’s board of trustees, said. Declaring that there is “shared power” between the city and community bodies, she said: “It has been beautiful. I am in gratitude.”

“Significant, significant renovation and expansion”

By this spring, a feasibility study regarding the IFCC’s future is expected to be complete, which will likely recommend large-scale changes. “We’re talking about significant, significant renovation and expansion,” Pak said.

Broadly speaking, the IFCC will become “a full service arts center,” Pak said, that can host classes, performances, artist studios and other offerings.

Originally built in 1910, the brick building is not seismically retrofit. “It’s a bit small and dated. Sound bleeds, so you can’t simultaneously utilize spaces,” Onayemi said. 

A decommissioned water tower, owned by the city, is located directly behind the IFCC. It’s likely that the tower will be demolished, Pak said, so that a renovated IFCC can expand into the lot –– a proposal that Onayemi and others support.

Once the feasibility study is complete, a master plan for the building and property will be developed. Once fundraising and design is complete, construction will commence.

Friends of IFCC will operate the building and oversee its programming. A formal agreement will exist between the city and Friends of IFCC, detailing, Pak said, “how we work together through every phase of this project.”

The result, Edwards said, will be “building a cultural center for our beloved community.”