Downtown Fresno maker space calls recent street art an honor

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- After the Fresno Ideaworks building was hit by a street artist, they secured the artwork and are now encouraging more.

According the Fresno Ideaworks, the street art first appeared last week, but within hours, the wood it was painted on was torn off and left in the dirt. That's when they did what any artist community would do -- they cut out the artwork and displayed it inside a glass door.

"The more we talked it over, the more we realized, street art is very much the artistic cousin of the maker movement. As a maker space, we encourage people not to wait around until the traditional lanes of "progress" are open and available, but to forge new paths and take ownership of their ideas by bringing them to reality," said Scott Kramer, Fresno Ideaworks President. "The street artists in our community have a voice and a vision and they aren't waiting around for external validation."

Ideaworks occupies a building on Broadway Street and Amador Street which was formally a Peerless Pumps manufacturing plant. Kramer said some of the building's windows have been boarded up ahead of a planned renovation. He said Ideaworks is now encouraging more art -- so long as it is limited to the wood on the boarded windows.

"Street art occupies a grey space somewhere in between graffiti and murals. Depending on your perspective, you're likely to push it closer to one end of that spectrum or the other. For the Ideaworks, we see it as an opportunity to provide space to local artists to express themselves, while also adding another, albeit temporary, layer to the artistic richness of Fresno's mural district," said Kramer.

Since last week some new renderings have appeared on the building and Ideaworks has been posting pictures of them on their Facebook page.

"After we moved Pee Wee inside, we contacted our landlord and asked permission to invite street artists to use the boarded up windows as display space. He was completely open to the idea, so we posted the invitation and it quickly became one of the most shared posted on our Facebook page," Kramer said.