The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art
Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for
the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length
and clarity.
In 2009, while expecting their first child, visual artists and life partners Leyden
Rodriguez-Casanova and Frances Trombly co-founded a new artist space in their hometown
of Miami. They named it Dimensions Variable after their short-lived visuals-only blog
that had showcased the kind of challenging art they rarely saw supported or valued
in their city.
Using a donated space in Miami’s Design District, Leyden and Frances worked in their
personal studios in the back, and in the small front space, Dimensions Variable started
curating exhibits. Leyden was committed to imbuing their new venture with the ethos
that had guided a previous Miami-based venture named Box that he’d co-run years before.
Dimensions Variable would support great art and artists without placing the demands
of the market ahead of the artists’ needs or aspirations.
Since its founding, Dimensions Variable has had to relocate several times for reasons
beyond their control due to the increasingly treacherous real estate market in Miami.
Since 2019, though, they have operated out of their largest space yet comprising 4,500
square feet in Miami’s Little River/Little Haiti neighborhood. In 2019 they also registered
as a non-profit organization and since then have continued to support a wide range
of artists with residencies, exhibits and, since DV is also a gallery, sales.
Here Frances and Leyden discuss very frankly the lessons they’ve learned in the last
14 years in how to make Dimensions Variable sustainable through thick and thin while
remaining as welcoming and enriching as possible to the art and artists they are passionate
about supporting.
Choose a question below to begin exploring the interview:
Frances Trombly: What was going on in 2009 for us — and even prior to that — we would be out and about
and looking at works within our community, and I guess we always felt like we wanted
something more. We would go visit other communities and we were craving to see work
that we were interested in. We were always seeing a lot of colorful works that were
mostly paintings or were sparkly. It was market-driven.
Frances: Exactly, exactly. I mean, we didn’t have any money. It was basically, “We have this
space.” We ended up later on partnering with an organization here and there to help
us support artists from out of town, but for the most part, it was local. It was works
that were not so market-friendly but that were inspiring to us.
Pier Carlo: And were you also creating — I have to talk about money — a stream of income for
yourself and your new family? Was this a new way of adapting to your growing situation?
Frances: Yes.
Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova: Not so much. I mean, Frances says yes, but —
Frances: Oh, he was saying no.
Leyden: We were … . I don’t know how you’re saying yes to that question because really for
the first couple of years, the invitations were just inviting artists to come to Miami,
and we would be able to potentially work with local institutions and be able to get
them into a residency or certain things of that nature. A lot of artists oftentimes
were very interested in just coming to Miami and working on a project. I think it
was two or three years until we got some funding.
Pier Carlo: So it was just opening up the doors as a pure act of generosity, just because you
happened to get a donated space?
Leyden: Yeah, we had a space, and we wanted to share it. It was just like, “Do you want to
come to Miami and work on a project? We don’t have any money.” [He laughs.]
Frances: When we agreed to do this, Leyden was very firm. He was like, “If I’m going to do
this, I’m going to do it right.” And that’s what he’s said this whole time.
Pier Carlo: And what did that mean, Leyden? What did doing it right mean?
Leyden: A lot of artist projects have this reputation of … . There’s this temporary nature
in which everybody expects them to just be around for a little bit, and then, “Oh,
artists, business isn’t their forte, so of course it was going to close down.” And
so I was just kind of like, “Well, if I’m going to do this, I want to do it seriously.”
Box was very hyper-independent. We paid for everything that had to do with the rent
and the projects there out of our own pockets because we didn’t want any kind of outside
influence, whether it was building a board or applying for grants and becoming a 501(c)(3),
in any of these things. We wanted to just have absolute control.
But in this case, I was like, “I want to do it for real, and I’m not going to pay
for it.” So it was like, “We need to make sure that we begin to set up the mechanisms
for this to become more serious over time.”
Pier Carlo: And so how long would you say it took for you to set up those mechanisms?
Leyden: Frances, in 2011, right?
Frances: Is that when the Knight Grant came in?
Leyden: Yeah. We were approached by Dennis Scholl, who we knew. We had a relationship with
him, and he had just taken on a role at Knight to be the Knight Arts Challenge cultural
director. He was out there, looking at what was going on in the city and what needed
to potentially have funding. He came to some of our events and said, “You guys should
apply.”
Guests along with Ricardo Alcaide (the artist), and René Morales (MCA Chicago Chief
Curator) experience Holding the Horizon, a 2021 solo project by Venezuelan-born, Antwerp-based
artist Ricardo Alcaide. Image courtesy of Dimensions Variable.
Leyden: I think you know, Frances, which one.
Frances: Catalina Jaramillo is a special exhibition for me. Is that the one you’re talking
about, Leyden?
Leyden: Yeah.
Pier Carlo: How was it special?
Frances: Well, as we were trying to, I guess, figure out our way with this space and the projects,
friends were like, “Hey, I’d love to put together an exhibition.” I would always be
like, “Yep, just send me a little paragraph or something.” A friend of mine, her name
is Catalina, sent me this proposal, and we read it. Her mother had passed away recently,
and she wanted to do this project about her mom dying. She’s in my studio, chatting
with me about how this would be such a meaningful thing for her. She sent me all these
beautiful emails and a little drawing of the concept of the show.
I came to Leyden and said, “We have to give her the opportunity to have this exhibition
so she can go through this process.” He and I were butting heads a little bit because
he was like, “Oh my god, she’s going to talk about death and dying.” We were really
young. It’s just an intense subject, and it could very easily go in a direction that
could be possibly very literal or something that was very —
Pier Carlo: Or sentimental.
Frances: Yes, or heavy. But anyway, we went back and forth, and I’m like, “Leyden, that’s
it. I’m giving her this exhibition. We’re doing this.” And we agreed.
Anyway, the show was called “You Are Always Here.” It was in 2011. Her mother was
an avid collector of objects, almost to the point of maybe being a little bit compulsive,
so she had all of her mother’s things. She took all of these objects, and she placed
them all around the perimeter of the gallery. This is a small rectangular gallery
that is 400 square feet-ish. I don’t remember the square footage, but it was small.
She very carefully went through all of her mother’s things, from puzzles to hairbrushes
to purses, and she just placed them all around. She had this beautiful layout, maybe
a foot in depth, all on the perimeter.
At the end of the exhibition, she had an event where she gave all those objects that
were her mother’s away into the community. It was very touching and a little sentimental
but visually very elegant and a very special exhibition. And to this day, I still
have her mother’s hairbrushes in my bathroom.
Pier Carlo: Oh, you got the hairbrushes!
Frances: All this time, I’ve had her hairbrushes, yeah.
[They both chuckle.]
I’m asking this because clearly there was a disagreement right there about Catalina’s
piece.
Frances: We for the most part aesthetically have a similar sensibility. I think it’s gotten
more complex as the space has grown. There are things that we’re navigating … . I
think we’re learning as we build. The arguments or any sort of disagreements come
from us not really being familiar — I don’t know if I’m being a little bit too vague
—unfamiliar with how to run a nonprofit. All of this has been a learning curve for
us both.
Pier Carlo: Well, let’s talk about that. Clearly, you’re doing something right because you’ve
been around now for how long? 14, 15 years almost.
Frances: Fourteen, yeah.
Frances: We started to realize that it was more difficult for us through a fiscal agent to
get grants. I think that that was a big thing, right Leyden?
Leyden: Yeah, we could only access so many funds, so many grants, that did not require …
I mean, we could get a fiscal agency and so on and so forth, but we just wanted to
… . I think one of them was the Warhol [Foundation], for example. You needed to be
your own nonprofit, so I think part of the decision was, “Well, if we’re going to
focus on a Warhol grant, eventually we need to do this.”
Because we were always about thinking, “How can we best structure this, and how do
we not necessarily follow what is expected of us to follow?” Like, “OK, you need to
be a nonprofit because you’re this artist-run space.” Or, “Oh, you need to be a gallery
or you need to be … .” We were looking at everything, thinking, “Well, can we create
some kind of hybrid that isn’t necessarily one or the other? And how do we navigate
all of these potential opportunities?”
Through all of this thinking about all these structures, we ended up as a nonprofit
because it seemed to make the most sense. We wanted to make sure that we were able
to support a program that remained independent of a market, even though we still wanted
to embrace the market. If we could place work and make sales for artists, great, but
we didn’t want that to be the sole direction.
Pier Carlo: So what you’re referring to, when you said kind of a hybrid model, is that you’re
a nonprofit that offers support to artists but you also operate as a gallery?
Leyden: Exactly. We wanted to function in-between as a hybrid, because we realized that in
order to support contemporary art, you’ve got to have the most incredibly diverse
methods of revenue. And we wanted to make sure that we could pay artists a stipend
to do an exhibition while at the same time trying to sell the work.
Pier Carlo: God, I love that. That sounds so revolutionary to me for an artist to get paid for
her exhibition while also trying to sell her work.
Frances: That’s the dream, right?
Pier Carlo: That’s amazing!
Leyden: Yeah, that’s the dream. But we learned from our own experiences.
Pier Carlo: Because I will tell you — I’m a generally pretty well-educated guy — I was in my thirties
before I learned that galleries generally keep 50% of an artist’s sale, which astonished
me. What you’re proposing sounds so different.
Leyden: Yeah, we had learned from our own experiences. We were working with emerging galleries
because we were also emerging artists. I remember working on a solo show and going
into debt. I went, I think it was, $10,000 in debt, making the show.
Pier Carlo: At a gallery, you mean?
Leyden: Yeah, at a gallery. Of course, you’re already in this debt, and you’re hoping, “OK,
I hope that something sells.” Oftentimes the kind of work that we were interested
in making was challenging work, and so the potential of a sale would have to be an
institutional sale or a collector that really had the capability to house a work or
a visionary collector that really was interested in the kind of stuff that we were
looking at. So it was really difficult to make that work. I think all those lessons
learned was why we were like, “OK, we have to try to figure this out.”
We were also in a new economy too. Technology was affecting so many industries and
making so many changes. We had musicians that were changing the way that they funded
their albums, and we had entire industries being completely turned upside down. So
it was like, “Why isn’t anyone in the arts thinking more and more about how do we
change the finances of it? How do we change the way that it works?” We were trying
to just figure out how to move forward.
Leyden: I think the move to becoming a nonprofit might’ve been something that we would’ve
done earlier. I think in certain conversations, there were voices who were advising
us that, “Well, maybe you don’t need to do that because you guys are artists and you
need to focus on your work.”
Pier Carlo: And also when you incorporate as a nonprofit, you do lose some control, right?
Leyden: Yeah, you do. And so that was something that we navigated for a little while. But
I think it can open up a lot of doors because the way that we always looked at it
was not that we were getting into this to be this profitable business; we were getting
into this as a service to art and artists. If that meant that we were paying ourselves
a modest salary … there’s no reason why someone working a nonprofit can’t make a decent
or a good living.
Frances: One of those pitfalls or one of those mistakes early on is that we wanted that give-back,
but we hadn’t really, at least until recently, been looking at the nonprofit as an
actual business for it to make money. Because the only way for us to actually give
back is to actually have the funding, so it needs to be a business. Originally when
we were starting, we didn’t have the understanding of that mindset.
Pier Carlo: So you were not incorporating your own financial needs in the picture.
Frances: No.
Leyden: No.
Pier Carlo: Which is very common, right?
Frances: Right. Which is a mistake.
Leyden: Well, I would interject and say that the financial compensation or the compensation
that we always made sure that was in the project was that our studios were always
a part of the project. We’d been invited before into spaces that would be donated
to us, but there wasn’t enough room for our studios, and so we would decline because
the way that we had structured it early on was that our compensation was that our
studios were there. In a sense, we were getting compensated by other means through
the use of the space, but also we were getting compensated by the relationships, the
exposure, the people that were coming through, the people we were meeting. So that
was always worked into the project.
But recently we’ve gone beyond that. You hit a threshold where you’re like, “Well,
we’re putting so much time into the project at this point that that model of compensation
of space and exposure only goes to a point before you have to cap the amount of time
that you’re putting into the project.” Because the more complex it gets, the more
you have to … . So now, when working on a project, we have to begin to look at financial
compensation as well, because everyone has bills to pay and everyone has to be paid
for their time.
We’re not only paying artists; we have to pay a team of people to make sure that the
project continues. That’s an important component now, particularly when you begin
to plan the future of the project. If you don’t have compensation for a team in place,
you can’t at a future date decide that you’re going to bring in a new director or
bring in someone if those things are not in place.
Installation shot of Close to Home, a 2023 solo project by Korean-born, Miami-based
artist Jee Park. Image courtesy of Dimensions Variable.
[Long pause]
Leyden: Frances?
Frances: Are you sure you want me to answer that?
[They both laugh.]
Pier Carlo: Oh, this sounds juicy. What’s going on?
Leyden: We’re excited about a couple of things. There are some exhibitions that are sort
of bubbling. We’re excited about the new artists that have come on board to rent the
studios. We recently made a shift in a little bit of our structure because of the
volatility of Miami real estate and all the challenges that we’re facing in this rapidly
growing city. We have opened up more studios in our building, and we’ve made some
shifts to the galleries.
Unfortunately, the studios became more expensive, which was something that we didn’t
want to do and that I held off as much as possible. But Frances was shaking me, telling
me that we needed to make some changes.
Pier Carlo: Is that what you were referring to, Frances, when you said, “Are you sure you want
me to answer this?”
[They laugh.]
Frances: Well, go ahead, Leyden.
Pier Carlo: No, this is fascinating because it’s about running a business and market demands.
Leyden: I’m just going to say that we had told a lot of artists that were coming through
Dimensions Variable, “Hey, the payment that you’re paying is only for utilities. These
studios are this way because this is how we believe they should be. But we can only
do this as long as we can keep them, as long as we can raise the funds to do this.”
We were hoping that collectively we could all work our networks to be able to do that,
but unfortunately Miami has been growing rapidly, and it’s just been intense.
Frances, you were going to add to that?
Frances: No, I think you pretty much summed it up.
Pier Carlo: It sounds like it was a difficult conversation because in a way, you did have to
adjust your guiding ethos a little bit because of the market.
Frances: Yeah.
Leyden: Yeah. We had to make another one of those decisions of, “We have to adapt to a market.”
The building owner has certain things that he needs to take care of, and I do my best
to mitigate that. But like Frances said so eloquently, we have to be a business that
has the funding to continue to do what our mission needs us to do.
But even our funders — whether it’s the county, the state, federal or foundations
— if they don’t see that you’re making other revenue, they’re going to not feel very
comfortable in continuing to fund you. We’ve learned all these lessons, because we
were thinking, “Oh, out of the virtue of our program, we’re going to get funding because
it’s important the work that we’re doing.” Well, not so much.
Pier Carlo: Yeah, they’ve created a little bit of a Catch-22 for you and other nonprofits. Would
it ever be feasible in your planning to own your own building?
Leyden: That’s been on the table for a while now.
Frances: Yeah, we’ve looked at that. We would love that and it would help tremendously, but
it’s complicated.
Leyden: Yeah, that was a conversation that we were going to have with or wanted to have with
one of our biggest supporters, the Knight Foundation. We were really looking at the
numbers and saying, “I know you guys want to support us being around and you want
to support us being successful. The ultimate way that we could do that is if we bought
a building and technically rent-controlled ourselves for the next thirty years,” but
for some reason … .
Pier Carlo: You never hear about funders funding building purchases.
Leyden: You don’t. You don’t. And it’s beyond us the amount of money that’s just being thrown
out the window. Arts organizations are not being given the power.
Pier Carlo: Why do you think that is?
Leyden: I’m not sure. We have two examples in the city of Miami that are the most incredible
examples of what happens when an organization buys real estate. One of those examples
is Oolite Arts, formerly known as ArtCenter/South Florida. In the 1980s, they bought
two buildings on Lincoln Road, turned them into studios, and did their thing for the
next 30 years. Not too long ago, they sold one of them and instantly became the institution
in South Florida with the greatest endowment.
Pier Carlo: Wow.
Leyden: That’s one example. The other example is Bakehouse, which has been around again since
the ’80s, and they have now I don’t know how many studios. They’re one of the biggest
studio providers in South Florida. They own their building, and they’re able to do
all kinds of different things. One of those things is that they’re not getting priced
out in terms of rent for their building.
We’ve had this conversation with Michael Spring, who is now gone but was the director
of Miami-Dade Art in Public Places. When we asked him, “Why aren’t there more grants
like this?” he said that they’re having those conversations, but at the county and
state level, they’re really long conversations to have.
It’s beyond Frances and myself that since the ’80s, there hasn’t been a conversation
about that.
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