Creative Retreat Elsewhere
Sample Agenda
DAY ONE
Introductions
Students will introduce themselves by learning how to shake hands and share initial reactions to the
museum.
Adventure Tour
We will embark on an immersive journey into the living museum starting with the 1st floor and
proceeding to upper levels. Students will observe various archaeologies of the collection and discuss
aesthetic notions that re-orient what a museum could be. The tour is meant to activate curiosity and
inquiry about the role of a museum and art in general.
Lunch Break/Explorations
Living Room Salon
A discussion of Elsewhere concepts: Responding to Site; historical and archival platforms;
environments and landscapes; sociality and participation; museum as a platform for collaboration;
collaborative fictions; evolving and ongoing collections; play; remarking histories; radical inclusivity. In
particular we will focus on Species of Space and Other Pieces by Georges Perec
Collaborative Dinner | 7pm
Retreat participants will design a collaborative dinner experience in the Elsewhere Kitchen Commons,
constructing an artful dining experience focused on generosity, hospitality and playful etiquette.
DAY TWO
Project Lab
Elsewhere Intensive designed in collaboration with teachers. A project will be designed to explore one
of the following themes: curatorial agency, new media, collaboration, non-profit public art, creative
exchanges, storytelling via objects, social process, performative everyday life.
Projects are either based in new media (video, photo, sound) or collaborative installations guided by
Elsewhere curators.
Collaborative Dinner
A dinner curated with the help of participants in Elsewhere’s Kitchen Commons.
DAY THREE
Brunch Reflections
A reflection on Retreat experience, and project undertaken ending with a family portrait of the group.
Cleanup of campsites and departure.
Elsewhere | 606 S. Elm Street, Greensboro, NC 27406 | goelsewhere.org
1
ABOUT ELSEWHERE
Beginnings
In 1937, Joe & Sylvia Gray launched a series of businesses principled on the creative use of available surplus in downtown
Greensboro. Realizing that trucks sent to New York with new furniture were returning to the region empty, they began filling
them with stock from Depression-era storehouses in the North. Before long, the business known as Carolina Sales Company
outgrew its space at 607 South Elm. In 1939, the Grays bought the building across the street. The space was large enough
to include a first floor retail store, a second floor four-family boarding house, and a third floor warehouse. Following WWII,
the furniture store gradually transitioned into an army surplus business with extensive catalog sales that sent pup tents, army
bags, and canteens to Boy Scout troops and hospitals around the country. Sylvia mended army goods up on the third floor
that were brought up from the back alley via homemade pulley.
Joe & Sylvia Gray
Joe Gray unexpectedly died in 1955, leaving Sylvia with three children to raise. The ten year period following his death
included the decline of the once booming surplus and catalog sales company. With the goal of increasing revenue, Sylvia
began buying the ends of fabric bolts, upholstery, denim, and copious amounts of finishing ribbon from local mills. She shut
down the boarding house to save money and boarded up the warehouse.
Hoardiculture
During the late 70s Sylvia’s inventory expanded once again to include general thrift items such as toys, books, clothing,
dishes, housewares, and wigs, as well as general knick-knacks, junk, whatsamacalits, parts, pieces and particulates, bits
and bobs, furniture, glass, etc ad infinitum. The first floor was filled until only a tiny path between the boxes and piles
remained. She shopped twice a day at the local Salvation Army and Goodwill, followed by a host of other women store
owners who snatched up objects that she handled but returned to the shelf. Over time her inventory became more or less a
collection, more or less a hoard, more or less an archive that detailed her tastes, interests, and perceptions of value.
Ribbons were tied around tissue boxes stuffed with toy cars. Dolls were preserved in Roman Meal bags, strung together with
various other bagged collections like dresses, jewelry, plastic toys, and dried out pens. Sylvia would buy clothing items for
their buttons, cut them off, and stow them in jars. She would take piles of ribbon home with her in the evening, wash them,
iron them, and roll them around a pencil. Sylvia worked in the store until the day before she died. The astounding
accumulation amassed over her lifetime remained in a massive heap that was boarded up after her death in 1997.
Elsewhere
In 2003, George Scheer (Sylvias grandson) and Stephanie Sherman took a spring break trip to the South with friend Josh
Boyette. On a whim, the three soon to be college graduates decided to stop by Greensboro to see the old store that George
had been telling them about. The objects that the young writers found sent their minds in a million directions! Sylvia’s
artifacts demonstrated a potential ability to expose the kinds of ideas that form and stimulate personal connections. Of the
many questions that arose from the encounter, one resonated: Could Sylvia’s collection become a thinking playground? In
May 2003, George recruited two friends from Michigan, Josh Fox and Matt Merfert, to move with him to Greensboro.
Declaring Nothing for Sale!, the crew of three began the long process of discovery and organization. Stephanie Sherman
and Allen Davis joined them in October. A year into the excavation, Elsewhere became a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. In
2005, the group launched an artist residency program to bring global creatives across media and discipline to Greensboro in
Elsewhere | 606 S. Elm Street, Greensboro, NC 27406 | goelsewhere.org
2
order to create new works using the collection. Thanks to a grant from the Greensboro United Arts Council, some chance
movie shoots, a new-work commission (for a giant Lite-Brite!), an active crew of volunteers, and the creative inspiration of
artists, Elsewhere built a sturdy foundation upon which to continue dreaming.
CONCEPTS
“collaborative”
Elsewhere explores “collaborative” as a creative model wherein individuals pursue particular visions by building from a
shared collection of materials upon, within, and amongst others’ works. By using the collection and arrangement of objects
as the common basis for creation, creators respond to creative practice through their interactions and intersections.
Collaboration occurs with others through reciprocity towards things, environments, histories, and as a positioning towards
configurations that accept new responses, conditions, and scenarios. Elsewhere’s museum explores and exhibits the
conjunctions of permanence and transformation, intention and accident, the everyday and the exceptional.
day to day: performance, process, practice
Elsewhere is an ongoing, unfolding story of life as an art form. We explore the slippages of ourselves as characters in our
own lives as an ongoing performance to us and others. We remain open to being visible, being read, considered, interpreted,
imbued with meanings we didn’t intend. We see ideas through enactment. We are all collaborating on curating this process
and we follow tributaries, trajectories, caverns, methods, and experiments that express our wonder and agency in an
ongoing unfolding of this story of preservation and genesis.
collection
The collection (or “set”) of objects at Elsewhere forms a limit within which infinitely derivable contexts, works, and
arrangements are demonstrated and performed. Here, antique objects and art objects, neither sacred, coexist in a
transforming installation that creates constellations of materials, processes, and products. The internal circulation of things
enables Elsewhere to approach creative practice as a basis for communication and response. Organization becomes a
means for ordering and tracing the trajectories of an evolving community.
environment
Elsewhere’s commitment to site-specific works, actions, and ideas establishes an ethos of consideration,
incorporation, generosity, and manifestation. We investigate this microcosm as a means for exploring the
interaction between the particular and the general. We are interested in how contexts define logics and
paradigms, and in how we can operate responsively to and within these contexts and frameworks. We are
deeply invested in place-making as a practice. Within an environment of at-hand resources, notions and
concepts are always within reach, driven by the proximate and reconsidered in action.
Elsewhere | 606 S. Elm Street, Greensboro, NC 27406 | goelsewhere.org
3