The Western Avenue studios have been so successful that the developer is creating 50 units next door where artists can live as well as work. (Ibby Caputo/WGBH)

LOWELL, Mass. — Tucked between train tracks and the Pawtucket canal, is an old mill – a place that made Lowell a cradle of the industrial revolution. Today, manufacturing is gone and this mill is the cradle of an artists’ revolution.

But getting here took some time and a major obstacle: trust.
 
A "dirty, smelly" start

Karl Frey purchased the mill ina 2004 as an investment. However, his tenants quickly went bankrupt, moved out and left the mill empty. With few options, Frey turned to the city for advice and learned about a group of artists who were courted in the 1990s to revitalize Lowell but got burned by developers who had promised them affordable housing — and then built luxury condos instead.
 
Frey invited the skeptical artists to visit, but he overestimated the romantic draw of his old mill.
 
“It was dirty, smelly, poorly lit, broken-down cardboard boxes all over the place, but I figured they could visualize the space,” said Frey. “Boy, was I dead wrong on that one.”
 
Frey said he wasn’t taking no for an answer, so he emptied out a floor and painted it white, then invited the artists to the mill again, this time for a party.
 
“We stopped at Walmart on the way and picked up some plastic tubs and stopped at the liquor store and got ice and beer,” Frey said. “We set up a card table and a cheese platter, and I had an architect draw up some floor plans.”
 
Frey even mapped out the studios on the floor using yellow traffic paint. This time, the artists loved the clean, open space.
 
“It started a land rush, and we leased that whole floor that night,” Frey said.
 
Building up Western Avenue

Maxine Farkas has a studio at Western Avenue, but she can't sleep there. (Ibby Caputo/WGBH)

That was the beginning of a very successful symbiotic relationship. Artist Maxine Farkas runs the mill, which became known as the Western Avenue Studios. She said Frey has never broken a promise to the artists.
 
“I think that is what makes this relationship with a developer so successful,” Farkas said. “Because he keeps his word.”
 
Frey’s word led to 200 artists moving into studio space in the converted mill. But that’s not all. Frey and the artists started working on a new idea: converting another building in the mill into 50 affordable work-living spaces for artists. Learn about the new building.
 
“This used to be a freight elevator shaft, but we’re going to turn it into my husband’s recording and mixing studio,” said jeweler Heather Wang, who recently shared her vision of the renewed space with some artist soon-to-be-neighbors.
 
“Heather has a space that is carved into the old uses of the space,” said Rebecca Mattson, the local developer working on the project. “Some of them are wide open, some have exposed brick, some have exposed wood — there’s all the variants of the original building based on how it was built and what it was used for,” she said.
 
The new housing units are between 800 and 1600 square feet, the size of an apartment or a small house.
 
“Literally it's wide-open space so you can do whatever you want,” Mattson said.

Farkas at the spot she envisions for her bed. (Ibby Caputo/WGBH)

Farkas, whose apartment is being built on the second floor, said she is most excited about her neighbors.
 
“I’m going to have a community. And that’s the most important thing for me,” Farkas said.
 
Mattson relished the artists’ enthusiasm.
 
“It’s freedom. It’s community. It’s open spaces,” Mattson said. “You just can’t go into any apartment building and paint your walls and build a loft.”
 
It’s also remarkably affordable: one dollar per square foot.

Making the new space happen

A tour of the apartments-to-be. (Ibby Caputo/WGBH)

Mattson said that was possible because the developers and artists worked closely together.
 
“We don’t have an elevator in the building,” Mattson said. “They were willing to go without air conditioning. They’re willing to go without dishwashers. There willing to go without any flooring. They just want primed walls. They just want space that they can afford.”
 
Mattson said that this is the first time a space for artists is being traditionally financed.
 
“Usually it's highly subsidized,” Mattson said. “This is different because it’s coming from the real estate perspective. It was hard for bankers to get their mind around what an artist rental live-work space could be.”
 
Fortunately, the artists had Karl Frey on their side. And in the words of Farkas, Frey is wicked persistent.
 
“TD Bank, a very, very well-run financial institution, has made us the loan to do the 50 live-work units,” Frey said.
 
Frey said it's not a loan a bank would normally make, but he was able to show them five years of success at the Western Avenue studios.
 
“One day I will turn the building over to the artists and their principal interests, taxes, insurance, reserves for replacements — everything that cost them to run the building will be exactly the same as it was the day before when they were paying rent,” Frey said.
 
Frey said that seven years ago no one would have believed that 250 artists would be living and working in his mill. But he courted the artists, he convinced the bankers and he even surprised himself.
 
The next open studios at Western Avenue are on Mar. 3. The live-work space is anticipated to open in May.

PEABODY, Mass. — On view at the Peabody Essex Museum right now are scenes from an affair both torrid and tempestuous. When artist Man Ray met model Lee Miller, they fell madly in love and produced some of the twentieth century's most celebrated works.

Lee Miller was a 1920s supermodel when she met Man Ray.

"She appeared on the cover of Vogue, she became Edward Steichen's favorite model. And then a curious thing happened. Her image was licensed to the Kotex company for feminine hygiene products. And as a result, all of her modeling work dried up and she had to find other things to do," said Phillip Prodger, curator at the Peabody Essex Museum.

Man Ray was a surrealist artist — a legend already in the making and 17 years her senior. Looking to be an artist in her own right, Miller tracked Man Ray down in Paris — finding him at a bar near his studio.

Prodger describes the moment Man Ray and Miller met. "Man Ray says there are two problems. 'The first problem is I don't take assistants. And the second problem is I'm going on vacation and I won't be back for two weeks.' She says, 'I'm going with you.'"

And she did. It was 1929 and as documented in "Man Ray | Lee Miller, Partners in Surrealism" now on view at the Peabody Essex Museum, the two spent the next three years together. She was his apprentice then a peer and always his lover. They pushed each other personally and professionally, establishing singular styles.

"Man Ray was primarily interested in photographing in the studio and he was a very theatrical artist in a way," Prodger said. "He liked to set things up... you see Man Ray making surrealist compositions in the studio, you see Lee Miller going out on the street and photographing things that she sees. And in fact she was one of the first photographers to do that."

In this exhibit, you will find their disparate take on nudes as well. He finds a softness and rapture in her.

Prodger described Man Ray's rendering of Miller: "It's very warm, very inviting, she looks sensual, beautiful and erotic."

Prodger said that Miller found nothing erotic in herself. "She looks strong, you can see muscle definition, her back is held upright, she really looks like a feminist hero."

Aside from perspective, their personalities collided too. Theirs was an aggressive relationship fraught with jealousy and conflict. Like the time Miller fished one of Ray's photographs out of the trash and claimed it as her own. Man Ray exploded.

"He took that photograph that she had printed which showed her neck, took a razor blade and sliced the photograph across the neck and then took scarlet paint and painted where the so-called wound would be in that photograph and it was dripping down as if he had slit her throat," Prodger said.

Among the most famous of Man Ray's manifestations of rage — his metronome.

"He attached her eye to the pendulum of a metronome and gave instructions that it should be set in motion going back and forth, back and forth, until the viewer couldn't stand it any more and then smashed with a hammer," Prodger said.

And when she left him, Man Ray got over her in part by creating his painting of levitating lips. They are Miller's and he tended to it every day for two years. Lovers for just a spell, Man Ray and Lee Miller remained intertwined for their lifetimes. Their work though, evokes for eternity.

"Man Ray | Lee Miller, Partners in Surrealism" is at the PEM through December 4, 2011

BOSTON — The Museum of Fine Arts isn’t the only Boston museum with a major expansion. Just across the park from the MFA, a vast, $114 million extension is rising behind the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, designed by famed architect Renzo Piano.
 
Anne Hawley, the director of the Gardner Museum, said the expansion was tailored to fit with the existing museum. “One of the things that Renzo Piano -- who so understands this building -- wanted to do was to make sure that the buildings, that the new building respected this building. He said it had to be like a nephew to a great grand-aunt.”

Site Plan of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (Renzo Piano Building Workshop 2010)

And the great grand aunt, by the way, is getting a facelift. The new building allows for Mrs. Gardner’s palace to be restored back to the way she left it—including the grand tapestry room, which has doubled as a formal concert hall for the past 40 years.
 
“For over 100 years, this building has been loved to death but there’s just too much going on in it,” Hawley said. Everything from fixtures to tiles to the 16th-century Flemish tapestries will be restored.
 
But the bulk of the work is happening behind the museum, with the new 70,000 square foot building. It’s larger than Mrs. Gardner’s Palace.
 
Originally, Hawley and her colleagues told Piano they wanted the extension to “float poetically” behind the museum. “And to have a great feeling for people when they walked into it. And to have that intimacy of scale that the Palace has,” Hawley said.
 
So visitors will now enter the museum on a floor entirely enclosed by glass, giving the sense that building does float. It also gives patrons a clear view of the palace and surrounding gardens.
 
Hawley says it’s a definitive contrast from the original structure. “That is such a closed building. No one really knows when they look at it what’s going on inside. So the idea was that this would be very transparent and it would be open to the park and public,” Hawley said.
 
In addition to a new café, gift shop and offices, there will be a 2,000 square-ft. special exhibitions gallery here as well. It’s three times the space of the old one.
 
“It’ll be for contemporary artists but it will also be for historic projects and we’ll alternate between them. And it has, it goes 36 feet up,” Hawley said.
 
And what’s quickly shaping up to be the most iconic space in the museum is a soaring new performance hall. Previously housed in the Tapestry Room, here it will be a very singular cube with only two rows on each side of the ground level and just single rows on the three balcony levels.
 
“It is going to be intimate and lively and I think people are just going to love it,” Hawley said. She says there’s no other space like it.
 
We’ll be able to hear and see for ourselves when the new building opens in just 11 months.

The steel had leaped to hyperbolic altitudes. Diamond seems to have turned that image into music.

I hope you can take a little time with each of these American voices – and let me know what you think!