Dirt Palace Storefront Window Gallery

The story

The library closed long ago; 14 Olneyville Square then held jewelry manufacturing, then a church, and by 2000 it had sat empty long enough that the windows were boarded and the roof leaked. A group of women artists took it over and, after thirty to fifty pages of candidate names, settled on Dirt Palace — the only one nobody vetoed outright. Pippi Zornoza, a co-founder and now co-director with Xander Marro, calls it “an experiment in being a separatist space”: find out what happens when women artists live and work next to each other. Providence's late-1990s underground, as she puts it, could feel very boy.

Twenty-five years and some sixty-five resident artists later, it still runs on labor the residents did themselves — floors, walls, bathrooms, subdivided rooms — with subcontractors only for roof, windows and fire alarm. Studios downstairs, apartments upstairs, plus a band room, printshop, woodshop, animation studio and library. The building was only certified as legal live/work space in 2015, the same year the collective incorporated as Dirt Palace Public Projects, the nonprofit that now owns it and the Wedding Cake House at 514 Broadway. Owning the building is much of why the collective outlasted the Providence underground spaces that got demolished or shut.

The public face is the Storefront Window: a glassed-in installation aimed at the six thousand cars and the foot traffic crossing Olneyville Square every day, free and lit around the clock. Re-hung monthly since 2000, it has carried hundreds of local, national and international artists, community groups and youth programming. Staff curate it entirely by invitation, the calendar books about six months out, and unsolicited proposals aren't accepted — explicitly so artists aren't pitching for a slot that's already gone.