Get a Room

At the Art Hotel, residents earn their keep with their work, not their wallets.

by Holly Otterbein

[ visual art ]

Jessica Kourkounis SUITE DEAL: Krista Peel and Zak Starer, Philadelphia Art Hotel proprietors, surround themselves with the fruits of their residents' labor.

Krista Peel and Zak Starer, the thirtysomething married couple who recently founded the Philadelphia Art Hotel, may be a little too trusting. We're sitting in their West Philly townhouse, a stark white building so thoughtfully furnished that you can easily imagine it in the pages of ReadyMade, when they admit to a mistake.

"What if people fuck up our shit?" asks Peel. "Should we get them to sign a contract?"

She's talking about the Art Hotel's guests, who carry out their free, two-week artist residencies in a quite unusual way: Rather than live in a separate building, or at least in separate rooms than the founders, they set up camp in the very townhouse we're chatting in. Where do Peel and Starer go in the meantime? "To Zak's parents' house in the suburbs. It's really dull there," says Peel. "Or to our friends' place down the street. We're kind of vagrants right now."

By the time I visit them in early August, Peel and Starer have already hosted one artist-in-residence, muralist Kelly Mueller. She was left with their brand-new kitchen, their cats, their nice modern chairs and their respectable contemporary artwork collection — without so much as a written promise that she wouldn't burn the place down.

Thankfully, Mueller did no such thing. Instead, she parted with a gift to Peel and Starer: a small, dreamy painting she made there. (One of the residency's two requirements is that you leave the founders with a nice little addition to their art reserve. The other is that you lecture about your work, usually at the Free Library.)

The hotel's housing situation is hardly its only idiosyncrasy. Its short duration — roughly two weeks — is odd, too. Most artist residencies are several months to a year long, probably because most founders don't have to couch-surf when artists arrive. Plus, residencies often take place outside of cities. Philly, for instance, is usually home to less than five at a time, including those currently at the Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study, the Dupree Gallery and the Fabric Workshop and Museum.

And then there's the hotel's miniature golf course.

"I thought we weren't gonna mention this," says the smiley, blond-haired Peel, looking to her husband before deciding to continue, hesitantly, anyway. "We've got big ideas. One of the more zany ones is to, when we expand, have a mini-golf course open to the public. The artists would make the sculptures for it."

This wacky conception is a part of Peel and Starer's very serious plan to operate the Art Hotel like a for-profit business, rather than a nonprofit residency, which is also the norm. In October, they'll be moving into a three-story townhouse in Kensington, which will allot one story to the couple, one to resident artists and one to some union of a store, gallery, lecture space and, eventually, an actual hotel. "[The hotel] would be for artists who are coming into the city," says Starer, "when they have to work on a project for a short period of time, like if they have to speak somewhere."

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

Most of Peel and Starer's offbeat decisions seem to stem from deficiencies they found in their own residencies — Starer went to the New Orleans Sculpture Lab and the Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota, while Peel stayed at the Centre D'Art i Natura in Spain. "There were more sheep in the town than people," says Peel. "I was surrounded by beautiful mountains and it was run by a wonderful couple, but it was kind of lonely. Sometimes I wanted a pub to go to."

And so the couple hopes the hotel's urban setting will provide residents with plenty of watering holes — and offer a direct inspiration for their artwork, too. So far, it's done both: Renetta Sitoy, a video, animation and sound artist who finished her residency in mid-August, says she poked around in as many cafés, parks and venues as she could find. She also completed several works related to Philadelphia. "I did a video performance piece where I ate a Philly cheesesteak, which was the first meat I've eaten in 17 years," she says.

Was it painful? "Let's just say my stomach wasn't, uh, working afterward," quipped Sitoy.

She also created text-based animation that was inspired by Googling "Philadelphia is," which turned up everything from "the birthplace of America" to "starved for good bagels." And Sitoy's third piece incorporates video shot at Eastern State Penitentiary, which she says examines "the connotation of doors, windows and gates both as objects of freedom and confinement."

That's three finished works — not bad for a residency that's only two weeks long. And Sitoy gave Peel and Starer a DVD of those works to keep — also not too shabby. In fact, the stipulation that artists must leave a piece of their artwork is essential to the Art Hotel's existence, maybe even as essential as the founders' trusting nature, generosity and quirky entrepreneurial spirit. "I want to be surrounded by art," says Peel several times during the interview. "I want art to be stacked in piles everywhere, too much to even hang up."

(holly.otterbein@citypaper.net)

Artist-in-residence Eric Reyes Lamothe speaks Mon., Aug. 31, 7 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-686-5322, philadelphiaarthotel.org.