Odd Star studios and its legacy post demolition

The long awaited – read: long loathed – demolition of Odd Star Studios secret cauldron of artistry on the West Side, amongst one of Giv Group’s alt development projects, has finally been brought to rubble. Brewing for the past three years, the artist collective, event space and artist studios has been hosting community events, art soirees, gallery openings, immersive experiences all in an old mattress factory tucked behind West High and the railways. 

Odd Star Studios, a creative space in the Salt Lake DIY scene for artists to have an oasis of creativity, has been demolished.  

The demolition of the space, which was in an old mattress factory tucked behind West High School, has been a long time coming. 

“We always knew it was coming down. When we were building it, it felt foolish in some ways. Putting in all this energy, I thought it would springboard something for the community. Hopefully, enough people would’ve seen it and the launch pad would present itself,” said artist and collective manager Trevor Dahl. “And in some ways that started to happen.”

Odd Star was beginning to see returns on their energy investments into the space, garnering a following enough to outfit specialized holiday soirees and events like a fashion show. 

“Over the past four years, there have been a lot of artists involved, different groups and waves. A cultural hub. I feel like for so long it was the coolest, most new thing in the city. This underground thing that not everybody knows about and it’s really special for the people that do know about it. And then people find it and are mind blown,” Dahl said. “It was like a bastion of hope for culture. Where Salt Lake is a cool place where this can happen.” 

“It was definitely my favorite place in Utah at the time,” said Chris Parker, director of Giv Group, the development company overseeing the future of this building’s footprint. 

It all started as organized madness in one hoarder’s paradise. Essentially an artist installation from floor to ceiling, one man’s trash was treasure in this trove of dusty knickknacks and antiques and fixtures of all sorts. Musty books, crannies chuck full of figurines and doll heads on a shelf. A taxidermy pheasant in a glass display case stoically overlooks oriental rugs and velvet couches below. 

The eye could never rest. 

It was like a museum, but you could touch everything and one would walk out of the labyrinth with sooty fingers from touching the dusty objects of yesteryear. There was a four-month long estate sale to attempt clearing the space. 

Dahl and five other creative counterparts, all artists with studios in the space, eventually took the reins managing the space—creating art in their studios while planning events and community engagement as a collective. 

Wasteland Caravan and other mobile artist groups set up their canvas tents for a Bohemian lounge space. A stage became a place for music to happen with friends and locals passing through for open jam sessions and cards. 

“With the events here alone, that is probably thousands of people that came here just this winter. We have tried really hard to make it safe and a good vibe,” Dahl said.

The artists also took to the walls outside, painting murals covering the entirety of the once industrial building. Dahl himself painted a sky blue mural clad with a mermaid and other creatures of the fantasy sort. Yet the industrial building caused a lot of amicable trifle between the fire marshal and the collective. Making an old industrial building up to date with code was a constant uphill battle the collective worked on. As fire code upgrades went in, so did more art installations to the building, Dahl built a gallery to host shows and openings for himself, artists in the collective and the community. 

“I view it as a temple to art. In the most authentic form, self-funded junk art. Found objects and stuff. It’s pure creativity here,” Dahl said. “So whether people know about it or not, it’s serving the community and the whole art scene. Just the fact that it exists. Holding space to show that this can be real in this world.” 

“I will probably never again see that, from an artistic standpoint, level of raw madness,” Parker said.  

“All the people that have been a part of it have grown a lot, and knowing that you can do cool stuff like that, too. I feel a lot more confident in my own work and my ability to work with people and make big things happen. To coordinate massive projects. I think everyone who had a big role in this is leaving feeling empowered,” Dahl said.  

Yet just as the three years worth of work was peaking in impact, reach, extravagance in event spectacular, there were no more resources to be had. 

“It could have kept going if we had gotten some funding. But it just wears you down. We wanted the space to start serving more people. For it to be an institution in the community,” Dahl said. “But there is a disconnect between the people that can actually make that happen and us.”

That connection has become Giv Group and Chris Parker. Giv Group’s approach believes “that how we use our land has a profound impact on who we are and that healthy food, safe housing, clean air and meaningful connection should be available to everyone regardless of background or economic status,” their website said. “Giv’s intentional pairing of nonprofit and socially-driven for profit organizations allows it a broad toolset to get there.” 

“We are trying to generate good,” Parker said, “good is what we’re trying to figure out.” Ciphering through groups and organizations and missions to give the most to the community. 

“You make the money, but it is about who you are giving it away to, and in this case, you would need an artist group saying artists as their answer,” Parker said. “You have to weigh who you are giving it away to. If we have a refugee family that needs a nest egg so they can buy a home, is that better or worse than supporting an arts group?” 

“Everything has to be measured from what you took it from. You’re talking about the food programs we do, or the free transportation programs we do, or the housing programs we do,” Parker said. “Which one of those things is not happening so that you can support 12-15 people having cheap space.”

To do any of this, Giv uses tax credits to buy low and thus fund causes and programs that ultimately work to make building footprints into affordable, accessible amenities that give to the community. 

“If you agree to rent to individuals and families of a certain income or less, and you only charge them X amount or less, the government will give you tax credits which you sell the right to somebody who makes a lot of money…That reduces the debt on the building because it puts up the majority of the cost of the building and you earn something like a grant almost. And because you have less debt, you have less mortgage, you’re able to charge less in rent,” Parker said 

Several of Giv Group’s projects include live-work residential spaces where residents pay nothing for their retail space, only their residential. Making affordable starting your own business, incubating first time business goers. All made possible by their process that, Parker admits, looks a lot like gentrification in order to prevent gentrification. 

“The amount we paid for land and the buildings that were there were about a quarter of what it was six or seven years later,” Parker said. “That allows you some flexibility. So even though it’s a bit counterintuitive, the way to prevent gentrification is to do something that feels a lot like gentrification first. Get it while you can and build something.” 

Getting people affordable housing first, and then amenitizing the community so that people can afford to support it. 

“We thought it would be cool to go in and help communities to decide what they wanted to become, instead of it happening to them. But that looks a lot like gentrification right. Gentrification is typically used in the negative. What’s fascinating is that when you go into a neighborhood that is economically under-resourced, they would really like some amenities,” Parker said. “They would like a park in their neighborhood, they would like community spaces, a place to get coffee. And so the balance of how you resource and amenitize these communities – which will inherently make them more desirable, which will make the rent go up – without kicking everyone out is the central thesis of Giv.” 

Using this model to build affordable housing with amenitization for the neighborhood while cutting back on the displacing element often consequential in developing areas. “But the reality of the last three or four years has been different. The reality is gentrification is happening everywhere, there is no world in which many of these low income communities are not getting run over. It’s more like, given that fact, how many more people get to stay? That’s the bite.” 

Buy low, sell high, as they always say. 

“Five years ago you could buy a home in Guadalupe with a number that started with a one. Now it’s a four. You only have a very brief moment in time before that happens, where you can fire stuff and start putting these assets in,” Parker said. “So it’s getting ahead of it and doing a lot of the assets that maybe you don’t feel like you need now, but clearly you’re going to need them in five or six years. Because that’s how you buy a building where you can give it away for four years. Otherwise if you were to buy that building today, that would be upwards of five million dollars and no one is buying a five million dollar building and giving it away.”

Value within a company that feels rare in an industry bolstered on the idea of mass scale up, seen explicitly in the wake of the Utah’s launch to build thousands of new starter homes. When there is a staunch undervalue in resources, space, the land, the impact on the community during construction in the rising dominance of fast-architecture. 

“There’s not so much consideration for the preservation for any reason. It’s become what’s new, what’s more, what’s next, what’s better,” Dahl said.  

Finding more people beyond Giv Group and their innovative thinkers that care about these vital questions to engineering community has opened a path of inquiry to continue down for the betterment of cities and communities, the arts and locals. Reimagining what profitable means. Profitable in community building, profitable for the art scene’s dissemination, building people up, building this culture up. 

“At a certain point, we have to think about the soul of the city. If you can do all that and everyone gets their payday, that’s ideal,” Dahl said. “What kind of city do you have when everything is expensive and generic?”

But how to make sustainable artist spaces when capitalism – the foe often in creative communities – is the exact way to monetize the artist practice to create lasting spaces? 

“Artists, very broadly, because they are so uncomfortable thinking about how to make money, don’t see ways their art can be consumed in a completely non-sales way that could also pay them,” Parker said. “If you bought a rundown hotel, for example, and the artists are the ones who make a sweet room, now you have divorced someone from having to buy it from someone, rather they just experience it. If the artists then got a portion of the revenue of the building, then you could pay artists to continually create cool experiences. It’s the Meow-Wolf kind of model. But that sort of classic business sense is needed in the room. And it is not wanted in the room.” 

“There is a law [Utah Percent-for-Art Act] that any sort of public building that is made, one percent of the budget has to be spent on art. That creates so much work for people. The city will buy works to hang, sculptures, a public art commission. It would be cool if they could do that with private developers,” Dahl said. “If you’re going to build here, you have to have X amount of art. Whether that is custom pool tables or it’s a mural or whatever, but something that’s bringing soulful energy to the space and area. If 1% of new development went towards art, we would have a way different city.” 

Seeing more strategic planning, Parker believes, could land artists a more triumphant path ahead. The balance between the business planning of being a creative and the actual process of making the art is often no balance at all, rather a teeter totter with one kid touching the ground waiting for someone to balance them out. Leaving people like Dahl and his other core group high and dry, working full-time unpaid jobs to keep their momentum going. Whilst taking time and energy away from his actual passion: painting. Making that lasting, where art and planning and collaboration can coalesce without falling on the shoulders of a few to serve the many, brings forth the entire crux of how to move forward. 

“Saying, Here is what I really want to exist in our world, here are the necessary things that have to happen so this thing that is really important to me is enough. Some things might not be pure art, but how do we ramp up and scale a solution that allows what we love to stay. Instead of continual death to culture,” Parker said. “I think the biggest thing artists could do is realize they want it in the first place.” 

Because as he’ll admit himself, “Ultimately you don’t want us making the decisions,” Parker said. “If the decision maker of whether or not art still happens here is not an artist, there is a good chance it eventually will go away. That’s why I think artists need to own their buildings and the way to own your buildings is to understand how buildings stay and go.” 

Artists becoming the developers themselves. 

“I think more than how do you get developers to care, it’s how do you make people who care realize they can be developers,” Parker said. “What you find is communities that have exceedingly bright people that see development through something that happens to them rather than something that they can go out and do. I would love to be beat in a tax credit application process by an artist.” 

Taking matters into their own hands, just like how the artists started Odd Star in the first place. Making something because there was a hole, something missing that they sought to fill, for themselves and the community at large. 

At a panel discussion Dahl attended at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, the advice from elder creatives on the panel for any young artists basically described Odd Star. 

“They said find DIY spaces and do shows in your house. They had a space they would rent with other people and do stuff and basically described Odd Star,” Dahl said. The curation director said he had never heard of the collective but would love to come see it. “Well, it’s too late. I guess I didn’t meet him soon enough.”  

Disappointed people in power positions who could have maybe helped were out of the loop, there is still hope that this is just the beginning. 

“I want to believe that the energy will live on, it’s just scattered,” Dahl said. “Everyone is going to take that momentum somewhere. And if we’re scattered, maybe it’s better that way. It’ll proliferate.” 

“I think everyone tells these stories of impermanence being somehow a detriment to what was. Instead of thinking, maybe that was an impermanent thing,” Parker said. “What Giv would like to do is create a model that has large scale creative support. That can exist and can have continual fundraising. Because otherwise you end up with artist groups that have big donors and they are the fine arts and the really high end music, and that is fine as far as it goes. But then that is all that happens in the city.”

“I think a good takeaway from this is that you really can make things happen,” Dahl said. “You really can go out there and do stuff, you just have to find those right conditions, the timing. Nothing can live forever, so finding those pockets of where things can live.” 

“What you also gain is an agitation with the world that in some ways it's burdening to be like, I should do it,” Parker said. “But it is also completely invigorating. There has never been anything that has been done in the world that isn’t executed by someone who doesn’t care about it.” 

“People need art and culture and they’ll show up for it,” Dahl said. “That is what Odd Star proved.”