Nicole Emanuel sets out to make downtown Overland Park the next Crossroads

One afternoon this spring, Nicole Emanuel was sitting in her office at the temporary headquarters of the InterUrban ArtHouse, the nonprofit she founded three years ago in downtown Overland Park, talking about the organization’s future. Against one wall was a shelf of cubby holes with labels: “Budget,” “Capital Campaign,” “Legal,” “Strategic Planning.” A dry-erase whiteboard was covered in jotted notes, which she had given headings: “Asks,” “Grants,” “Corporate,” “Buy-Downs.” A copy of The Sustainable Nonprofit, by Debbie Wild, waited within reach.

“We need to raise $8 million in less than two years,” Emanuel said. “And we need to maintain all our current operations while doing that. So there’s a constant flow of work that needs to be done.”

Emanuel, who is 52 and draws from a sustained energy uncommon to most of the population, often appears to be doing little else. Her Google calendar looks like a losing game of Tetris — colored bars of various shapes slammed against one another, fighting for space and time. Each checked–off calendar item gets her closer to her goal: making IUAH the cultural and artistic hub of Johnson County.

She pointed at her face and laughed. “You know, my face didn’t used to look like this,” she said. “I’m not getting a whole lot of sleep.”

That day had already included meetings with an art therapist and an insurance agent, as well as a check–in with her assistant executive director, Nick Carswell. Emanuel was also conducting job interviews for an administrative assistant position and doing some research for IUAH’s upcoming capital campaign.

“Nicole is a little bit Willy Wonka, a little bit Steve Jobs and a little bit Salvador Dali, all rolled into one extremely organized and vivacious woman,” said Sherri Jacobs, the aforementioned art therapist.

Emanuel’s version of Wonkaland is, for now, the finished basement of a former church at 8001 Conser. The carpeted space has a kitchen, a common room, a conference room and eight glassed–in studios. The fully leased studios house two painters, an art therapist, a comic-book artist, a landscape designer, a video production company, a beadmaker, a portrait artist, and Emanuel herself (who paints and sculpts). It is not far from what one might expect of a Johnson County artspace: sleepy, clean, uncontroversial — a place where midcareer artist–entrepreneurs can quietly go about their business.

But Emanuel’s long-term plans for IUAH are considerably more ambitious. The capital campaign’s goal is to purchase the U.S. Postal Service building across the street. IUAH would convert it into a facility containing, among other things: nineteen artist studios, an exhibition space, an event space, two retail storefront units, a small café, and a sculpture garden. There would be lectures, exhibits, classes, rehearsals. (And a post office. Under the purchase agreement, IUAH would buy the building, then lease it back to the USPS.)

It would amount to the planting of a very large flag for the arts in Johnson County, one visible on both sides of the state line — Kansas’ version of the Crossroads. (Emanuel took the name InterUrban from a rail line that once shuttled between downtown Kansas City, Missouri, and Olathe.)

Eight million dollars is a lot of money, even in Johnson County, but Emanuel is confident in the strength of her appeal. There are, she says, many artists in Johnson County working in relative anonymity — artists who desire and deserve a place to interact. And the National Endowment for the Arts, at least, seems to agree that she’s onto something: It awarded IUAH a $150,000 “Our Town” grant in 2012 — the maximum amount, and only one of four of its kind handed out nationwide. Several other grants have followed.

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“After moving out to the suburbs and having children, I found myself painting again, in my basement, next to the laundry machine,” Emanuel said. (She lives in Overland Park, within walking distance of the Conser office.) “Eventually I was just positive there had to be others like me. And I have found them, and I keep finding them. So it’s important for me to debunk the stereotype that there are only white, middle–class soccer moms out here. This is increasingly a very different, very diverse community. The poverty rate in Johnson County has gone up astronomically in recent years. There are artists of all ethnic backgrounds, of all ages. And a lot of them are seeking community in arts.”

Not much in Emanuel’s background predicts a suburb as her ultimate civic canvas. A native New Yorker, she moved to San Francisco in her 20s.

In California, she says on a different day, “I was doing public murals in communities, and all my friends were living illegally in warehouses in the city. I had sort of a background with blueprints — my dad’s an engineer — so I started working with the city on a live–work code. Basically I would figure out the industrial and residential codes, and get all the inspectors to come into these warehouses and tell me what needed to be done to bring it up to code. Then I would help the artists do that. We were legalizing spaces where artists were already living.”

Emanuel continued along the path of forging artist communities in Minneapolis, where she and her husband, Luke McGlynn, moved in the late 1980s. Her pedigree with Project Artaud — the legitimizing of a landmark artist-squatters building in San Francisco — got her hired at Artspace, which was then a three–person office but is now one of the largest operations of its kind in the country. There, she further acquainted herself with the development process.

“Artspace would use this cocktail of incentives to leverage all possible financing for its projects to make them as affordable for the artists as possible,” she says. “Low-income housing, historic tax credits, tax–increment financing, community development block grants, community reinvestment tax credits. It was fascinating. The concept was that the nonprofit should own the property, which stabilizes things in the long term. That way, nobody can drive up the rent when the neighborhood gets nice.”

For a project called Frogtown Family Lofts, Emanuel helped spearhead the conversion of a large, empty warehouse into a 36–apartment live–work building for artists, with a two-story art gallery and a courtyard.

“It was a very diverse neighborhood — a big Hmong community, Native Americans, African–Americans,” she says. “I had to go in and have a neighborhood meeting to kind of present what we were doing and explain why artists would help the neighborhood and not destroy it. That’s a hot–seat position to be in. So I had to learn about reaching out into communities of color and working–class neighborhoods and making sure the population of the buildings we were working on reflected the population of the neighborhoods we were in.”

“She [Emanuel] has a unique skill-set for arts-based real estate development,” says Ross Currier, who worked with Emanuel at Artspace and is now executive director of Northfield Development Corporation, in Minnesota.

In 1992, McGlynn got a job at Hallmark, and he and Emanuel moved to Kansas City.

“I was heartbroken,” Emanuel says. “The Midwest was this bizarre animal to me, and KC was an even smaller urban step down from Minneapolis.”

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She soothed her heartbreak by enrolling, at age 31, at the Kansas City Art Institute. She assisted the painter Warren Rosser and was valedictorian of her class. When she graduated, in 1995, she immediately leased a loft in the Crossroads District’s Retro Inferno building (the fourth floor, 5,000 square feet, at $1,000 a month). It was at the dawn of the neighborhood’s renaissance. Leedy Voulkos and Byron Cohen Gallery were up and running, but little else was.

“There was no Bazookas, no [rehabbed] TWA building,” Emanuel says. “I had all this space — I would literally roller-skate from one end of the space to the other, it was so big — and I was showing a lot. I had a studio business. I had commissions. Then we moved again, to Wisconsin, for four years. It was a huge mistake. It was good for personal reasons — we were close to my husband’s father, who died when we were living there — but for me as an artist, it was like someone unplugged me from the universe.”

When they returned to Kansas City, four years later, the pair decided to have kids and moved to Kansas. Raising children distracted Emanuel from art for several years. But when her nephew, a street artist in Chicago, was murdered in 2009, Emanuel put together an ArtsKC grant application for some events in Chicago and Kansas City that would honor his memory. She got the grant and completed the project.

“It really inspired me and threw me back into community art after being away for all those years,” Emanuel says. “My kids had made it into elementary school by that point. I was able to kind of think again.”

Emanuel next won a commission to build the prizes (oil paintings and tabletop structures) for ArtsKC’s philanthropy awards ceremony. She started reading studies that examined the role of the arts in the metro area, and was surprised to discover that the numbers showed artists moving to Johnson County at an increasing rate (“The Status of Artists in Kansas City,” UMKC Urban Planning Department, 2008) and that Johnson County ranked in the top 4 percent in the nation in terms of arts participation (“Local Arts Index Report for Johnson County,” Americans for the Arts, 2010). That Johnson County supports 1,936 arts-related businesses employing 7,414 people is an oft-cited data point at IUAH HQ (one that also comes from the 2010 study).

“We had a suspicion that there was a large amount of artists in Johnson County, but it wasn’t until we partnered with ArtsKC and Americans for the Arts on the Local Arts Index that we discovered things like Johnson County has the highest concentration of individual artists in the five–county region,” says Sarah VanLanduyt, executive director of the Arts Council of Johnson County. “Eventually, working with Nicole, we put out a survey to see who all’s out there, what are their needs, their wants, their challenges. And we got an overwhelming response.”

Kristy Ladd, the grants and marketing director for Accessible Arts, which educates children with disabilities in Wyandotte County, met Emanuel through ArtsKC. “The fact that Johnson County spends more on arts than the other counties in the KC region is especially interesting because you could argue that it’s the county with the least amount of art opportunities,” she says. “So there’s definitely a need for an incubator–hub type of experience.”

“I had been thinking about this stuff and then one day I drove past this empty industrial building in downtown Overland Park and it kind of clicked: I could do an art facility here,” Emanuel says. “I eventually asked the owner of the building if I could borrow the building for a night and invite artists to come look at a raw preview of the building. And 150 people came that night to see an empty building. So that was kind of the beginning of InterUrban.”

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Roughly a year later, in the same week of August 2012, Emanuel was awarded 501(c)3 status for IUAH and the $150,000 NEA grant. She spent the money on leasing a temporary space for IUAH, hiring Carswell as a full-time assistant to develop IUAH’s arts programs (based on the mountains of data about Johnson County artists that Emanuel had compiled) and starting in earnest the design process of IUAH’s future home — hiring architects, paying for a topographical survey, negotiating with the post office.

“Nicole brings a great deal of energy to everything, and it’s very infectious to be around that,” says Chris Heinz, an architect on the project. “Her persistence has been pretty remarkable throughout.”

Bill Zahner, whose company, Zahner Metals, will build the projects’ grand entrance, agrees. “That kind of drive and initiative is rare, in my experience,” he says. “Her passion is such that when you start dealing with her it quickly becomes hard to say no.”

“I’ve never heard Nicole say no to anything,” Ladd says.

Who are these suburban artists?

On a Tuesday morning in June, 15 or so of them gathered at IUAH for a tutorial, led by Carswell, on how to use social media and the Web for marketing purposes. Only two were younger than 40. Few had a firm grasp on Twitter.

A man named John told the group that, after 29 years with Hallmark, he was working to become “the independent artist I always wanted to be.” In the early going, he said, that meant watercolor portraits of people’s pets, which he hadn’t yet determined how to monetize.

A woman named Mary-Lynn said she’d recently left a radio job in Houston and was trying to start her own freelance production business in Overland Park. A professional photographer named Rick spoke of moving away from contract jobs to work more on the art side of the business. Susan, a painter, had set down her brushes after having twins but was back into it, showing here and there. She gets commissions for portraits, she said, but her heart is in abstract–expressionist acrylics.

“I think for the last 10 or so years, when you think about artists in Kansas City, you think about the Crossroads,” Ladd says. “But you forget about artists who are moms and dads and have families but live in the suburbs because in a lot of ways it’s more affordable to raise children there.”

Among those leasing space at the Conser IUAH is Anthony Oropeza, a Web-development coordinator for a local parks department. He shares his IUAH studio with another artist, spending evenings and weekends there as he works on his bilingual comic–book series, Amigoman. Through Emanuel and her connections, he says, he has been recruited to talk with students at Briarwood Elementary School, in the Shawnee Mission district.

“The school has bought my books for the kids,” he says. “So it’s this very positive situation where kids receive a comic–book education and exposure to a different language and exposure to a local artist talking about art. And on my end, I’m getting the reward of engaging with the community, and I’m also getting paid, which helps me continue producing my comic books.”

Oropeza adds: “That business side of it —that’s one of the big things about InterUrban to me. For an artist that’s not especially business–minded, like myself, IUAH gives you the resources to help support yourself — marketing, networking, help with taxes, help with website. And if you’re already business–minded, and looking for inspiration from other artists, there’s plenty of that, too.”

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Rita Blitt, whose paintings, sculptures and paper drawings have been acquired by several museums across the country (including the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art), lives in Leawood. She plans to put her permanent collection at the new InterUrban whenever it opens. Snow and Co., a frozen–cocktail lounge that opened its first location in the Crossroads in 2012, is also going to lease space. And Public Glassworks KC, a glass studio, is a confirmed anchor tenant.

“The potential for the space across the street is really pretty astounding,” Carswell says. “It’s true creative placemaking —public, private, nonprofit and community intersecting in one space. Somebody who mails a letter at the post office will essentially be walking into an art gallery. Upstairs there’ll be graphic designers or music teachers at work. There’ll be artists’ work for sale. You can spend money in the private sector by grabbing something to eat or a coffee. And you can enjoy your coffee in a public sculpture garden.”

It’s also worth noting that downtown Overland Park — with its non–McMansion residential architecture, farmers market, independent shops and town–square charm — is an ideal location for Emanuel’s vision. But is the money there? Following a busy decade of high–profile arts projects that relied on deep philanthropic pockets — the Kauffman Center, the Bloch Building — and on the eve of UMKC’s proposed downtown arts campus, are the usual big wallets tapped out?

The IUAH’s price tag — $8.5 million — reflects Emanuel’s belief, based on her experiences here and in Minneapolis and San Francisco, that “renting a space and hanging up curtains to separate studios” (as was suggested to her at one point in the process) is insufficient. She points to the now–closed Arts Incubator in the Crossroads.

“They had an event space, artist studios, a gallery, a wood shop, a print shop — lots of the kinds of things I want to do,” she says. “It was an amazing space. But they got hit with code violations, which shut down their event space. Then they had to return all their deposits for those events and lost a huge amount of income and had to start selling things off. And since they didn’t own the building as a nonprofit — they were leasing it from someone — they couldn’t access financing to correct their problems. And it went down fast, and I think it was traumatic for the arts community. So I saw that and I thought, We have to own the building. We have to be code–compliant. We have to be in a position where we’re firmly fixed in the community.”

The capital campaign has not officially begun, but IUAH has already received a $250,000 private donation, and two others for $100,000 apiece, and Emanuel expects to sign the purchase agreement on the property soon.

“The only intelligent way to go about a project like this is to know where the money is coming from before breaking ground,” Emanuel says. “We can tolerate and service a small loan, but for the most part we need to raise the entire capital campaign, which is $8.5 million. So my hope is that everybody who has said we need this facility, that we need a community cultural center in Johnson County, will contribute to make it happen.”

Once the capital campaign is in motion, naming rights will be up for grabs. “There’s a lot of major industry headquarters in Johnson County,” Emanuel says. “We would be thrilled if a corporation wanted to pay to have its name on the sculpture garden. That’s another important point about the arts: When companies recruit top talent to come to Kansas to work for them, those people come with families and spouses that want culture and community engagement.

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“Look at me,” Emanuel continues. “Hallmark hired my husband, I ended up in the suburbs, thinking, What the hell am I supposed to do out here? And the answer has to be something authentic, something nearby that’s cultural and indigenous and engaged with the community. That’s what InterUrban is. It’s not some synthesized thing we’re trucking in. It’s coming up out of the community.”

Until the money comes through, Emanuel and her IUAH cohorts are making the most of their humble headquarters.

At a recent afternoon workshop in the Conser space, eight writers, led by poet Timothy Pettet, brainstormed ideas for bringing area writers together. Juliet Kincaid, who taught writing for 35 years and now self–publishes fairy–tale mystery books (Cinderella, P.I.), was talking about the idea of tweets as poetry.

“Maybe we can do a project where we talk about that form, establish the form,” Kincaid suggested.

Minutes later, her daughter, Jessica Kincaid, who makes beaded artwork, walked past on her way into the IUAH studio she leases. Adolescent girls occasionally entered and exited Sherri Jacobs’ art–therapy studio. Emanuel bounded in on a break between meetings as both the therapy session and the writers workshop were letting out. The girls buzzed around the room, fresh henna tattoos on their arms. The older writers sat around a table, chitchatting. Emanuel scanned the room, pleased with the day’s activities. She soaked up the creative energy for a few minutes, then made her way to the stairs. “I got another thing to go to,” she said.