ArtRod

ABOUT- Mission & History
Mission
The mission of ArtRod is to facilitate art exhibition in nontraditional public arenas. We have grown out of and in response to a specific need to bring contemporary art forms out of a solid conventional museum setting and directly into the community’s path.

History
Established in 1958, ArtRod (formerly known as both Allied Arts and Artists Exchange) has been an active contributor to the arts in Tacoma throughout the years. Under previous incarnations we produced a number of public art projects, the most well known being the Owen's Beach Promenade at Point Defiance Park and installations at the Dickman Mill, as well as significant involvement with the Commencement Art Gallery and various other regional projects.

Newly invigorated, ArtRod has gone through a multitude of changes. We currently focus on three major projects. The most recent of which is the Tollbooth Gallery. With its inaugural show on December 31, 2003 the Tollbooth became the World’s Smallest Gallery Dedicated Exclusively to Experimental Video and Wheat-Pasted Paper Fine Arts. This exciting and distinctive project is scheduled to continue well into the next few years, bringing high quality contemporary artworks to the public in a unique setting

Now in its fourth year, our ongoing experimental film/video showcase, “Don't Bite the Pavement”, has toured the West Coast and Canada. DBtP is an event showcasing Video Artists’ current work, sometimes in-process, and allows artists to not only garner critique and input to their works, but also provides filmmakers with an opportunity to screen their work outside of the traditional gallery setting.

In addition to these projects, we publish Toby Room, a quarterly magazine celebrating art, culture and life in the South Sound. It is distributed throughout Tacoma, Olympia and Portland. Toby Room was formed less as an outlet for traditional journalism than as a mechanism for artists to display their work in-print. It has become a hybrid of cutting edge artworks as well as writing about art, artworks, and the people and cultural events that influence artists. Each issue features an in-print Artist-in-Residence who is given the centerfold for 2 issues and the cover for the first.

ArtRod has mutated into an organization that deals directly with exhibiting established artists in sometimes bizarre public settings. We are a direct reaction to the sometimes stoic and disillusioned traditional museum setting.