Artstillery
Artstillery

On West Main Street, It’s Family Before Dollar.


Family Dollar is an immersive performance experience created from true stories of West Dallas.


This Event Has Now Concluded.


Please take a look at our YouTube Playlist of videos to see some of the Experience.


Visit the 3 interpretive shotgun homes.

View the videos in context and read from plaques made in partnership with the Nasher Sculpture Center.

Location:


323 West Main St. Dallas Tx, 75208


ABOUT

FAMILY DOLLAR

Narratives of a Dallas Neighborhood


Family Dollar is an original work which celebrates the power of community, family, and survival amongst communities on the margins in West Dallas. Based on true stories, it focuses on African American, Latino and Caucasian community members who live in historical shotgun homes on West Main Street. Three homes, three families, one story.

 

Each home struggles to raise the next generation by sharing the stories of the past to guide the present. All the while looming in the background are the pressures of an inequitable economy, racism and discrimination. A reality just as present in their lives as the levee their homes are pressed against. Just as that levee holds back the weight and threat of the river, the women of each home hold back the weight and threat of the world from crashing down on their homes.

 

Using the opportunities in front of them; life in the military, hustling and love, they change their family's story and that of the community. One home is an exception, where the only white lady on the street lives all alone. Her husband has passed and her daughter left for the suburbs long ago. Her neighbors on West Main are her family. 


But as the waters of dementia crash over her mind, reality slowly washes away. She is becoming lost within her own community. She pushes them away, even as they reach out.

 

As she fades, so it seems the community will too. It faces a new threat: Gentrification. There's no levee of stories built to protect them this time, and the lives of West Main Street must adapt or leave.

 

The performance will be outdoors. Taking place in three interpretive shotgun homes. At this 360 immersive performance we encourage you to walk around the buildings and follow several stories simultaneously unfolding in each home.


Presented with the generous support of 

Donna Wilhelm Family Fund & Amazon.


And in partnership with the

Nasher Sculpture Center as part of Nasher Public.

Watch Videos of Community Members Telling Their Story.

MISS. PAULA HUTCHISON

CLICK TO WATCH

“Sometimes we don't know where things came from... This street is my history.”

“A man can cry as long he's crying for something.”

MITCHELL HARRIS

CLICK TO WATCH

“” 

COMING SOON

CLICK TO WATCH

“” 

CONSERVATION & IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE 

Summer 2021 Artstillery relocates 3 shotgun houses

West Main Street once contained shotgun houses and single family homes up until gentrification began in 2016. Now what was once several homes on single lots containing several generations of black, brown and the poor white, are now new locations for multi-family development. Artstillery took down and rebuilt 3 shotgun houses on the land owned by Lone Star Baptist Church for historical preservation.

For over 80 years the church has served the community on W.Main St. It is still a fixture in the lives of  many who grew up there and who's stories helped build the narratives in the show. We asked the Pastor to write us his thoughts about the congregation and working with Artstillery. We're so grateful .

A LETTER FROM

Lone Star Missionary Baptist Church

The Lone Star Missionary Baptist exists for the sole purpose of building and advancing God’s Kingdom! We envision an exciting church that will continually reach and save unchurched people with the Gospel message of Jesus Christ. We envision an exciting church that will develop Disciples to advance God’s Kingdom. We envision an exciting church that gives God glory in all that we say and do. We are fueled, inspired and excited by the Holy Spirit as we are reminded just how far God has brought us individually and collectively and we are excited to tell the world, “What God Has Done for Me, He Is Able To Do For You!” We are fueled, inspired and excited as we stand on the shoulders of the saints of old that dedicated and committed their lives to the work of the Lord so that the history of this local church can continue! Because they did, we can!


It is our distinct pleasure to partner with Ilknur Ozgur and Artstillery as we look to preserve and educate others about the rich history of our West Dallas Community, particularly here on West Main St. The vision and passion of Ilknur to bring life to community stories that may have been lost or overlooked due to various transitions, is above and beyond amazing! We are thrilled and excited to be a vital part of the upcoming production “Family Dollar” this entire process of interviews, tearing down and rebuilding the shotgun houses has been a joy to watch and be a part of! If I could tag this entire process with one word that word would be “EXALTED” which simple means; held in high regard. Ilknur and her team have found value in the common life of people and have chosen to EXALT their stories so that the world may see that even in the common places; people have a story to tell! As I watch all of this unfold I am deeply moved to encourage people to write about your life story, or even in this era of technology make videos about your life story! Your struggles, your tears, your pain and certainly your victories all have value! What you have endured and overcome may very well be what others need to hear or see as they encounter life’s struggles. YOUR STORY MATTERS!


Sincerely,

Pastor Hersey L. Hammons III 

 FAMILY

DOLLAR

INCEPTION

In 2016 a group of artists entered a shotgun home full of stories and emerged with a mission.

An immersive experience called Family Dollar was performed in 2016 for only four days and almost in secret. It was the culmination of a performance workshop project by a group of talented artists and actors. It all started three months before, when two “shotgun homes” on a street in West Dallas were scheduled for demolition. They became not only the inspiration but the stage for the work.

 

Artstillery Founder Ilknur Ozgur worked out a handshake deal with the developer who had bought the two shotgun homes, which are only about 12-feet wide with rooms one behind the other. She arranged use of the houses until they were torn down. The demolition date was to be in two to three months, nothing exact, just as soon as the paperwork went through.

 

When the group entered the homes for the first time, they could feel the stories hidden there. In the crumbling buildings clues were everywhere: photos, glasses and other forgotten things.

 

Then in the dust of one home something special was found. It was the diary of a woman named Shirley, and this would turn out to be the main narrative. The diary was from the last year of her life in the home.

 

The diary was both a ledger and a place to keep her thoughts; it chronicled her journey of living in poverty, her struggles with hearing loss and her faith in Jesus. Shirley often wrote to Jesus for help with money, or praise for small daily miracles provided by neighbors.

The artists wanted to find out more. They reached out to her local church and started to fill in the blanks.



Shirley was a White woman who had lived on West Main with her Black husband. He had passed years before her. She was most likely suffering from dementia. Other information like names, places and relationships started to come together, and a story emerged.

 

The artist and actors became amateur historians, and they began to write a script based on the stories they were hearing. Over the next two months the artist listened and wrote. Simultaneously they cleared brush and cleaned the properties of the two shotgun homes. They worked quickly, the demolition day loomed in the distance. Once ready, a generator and lights were brought in, and the rehearsals started. Soon the show was ready.

 

There was no marketing. Members of the community found the performance through word of mouth. By the final day, more than 80 people were walking around the shotgun houses experiencing the "families" that lived inside. 

 

The show closed, and one week later the homes were demolished. Nothing was left but the dirt they'd stood on. It was a strong lesson about humanity and the power of art. The artists felt humbled that their passion had saved a small piece of the stories of the lives lived in those lost homes.

From that demolition something new was formed. The Family Dollar project had bound together the artists that worked on it. They felt they had done something special. That group became what is now Artstillery.

 

It laid the groundwork for Artsillery's mission to work with communities to turn their stories into immersive performances.

 

Family Dollar never left the minds of Artstillery members.  As the world changed in 2020, Artstillery slowly started to bring the script back to life. They had found many new facts about the diary and community. There was more story to tell than time allowed as they rushed to produce a show before the bulldozers showed up.

 

Artstillery started fresh and reached out to the community again. More forgotten stories of a small group of homes hiding next to the levee emerged. This time they had more friends, more work to do, and more opportunities to document and share stories threatened to be lost.

 

As they planned for 2020, little did they know that community was going to become more valuable for us all, and not just for the ghosts of West Main Street.


ARTIFACTS & MEMORY

The Reclaiming of Two Shotgun Homes


The houses on West Main street are surrounded, literally, by gentrification, with the new Trinity Groves on one side and four story apartment buildings advertising views of downtown on the other. The old homes on this hidden street are falling to the same fate as others around it. They are slowly being purchased by developers to be demolished to make way for new multi-family residences. As each structure gets wiped away, so does the visual and narrative history of the neighborhood. 


 From talking with the community Artstillery knew that outside the community, no one had concerned themselves with discovering and recording their narratives. It would be all the harder once the old homes were gone. As part of the process of uncovering hidden narratives in a community Artstillery collects artifacts, images and in the case of Family Dollar, the very homes where some of stories take place. As we prepared to take on Family Dollar in 2020, we discovered that two of the original shotgun homes on West Main St. were to be demolished soon.  Artstillery was moved to act.

Before & After on the Third Work Day.

      “Y'all are the only people I knew, that come through, to try and save things in this neighborhood. Everybody else come through and they say, 'Well, we can tare it down and rebuild.' I know y'all trying to save things for people. Like a museum, they can come through and see the things that once was there.” 


- Teddy,

On why he's helping Artstillery

save pieces of these old homes.


Teddy Celebrating After Helping Remove Doors on the First Day.

Collecting objects, images, and sounds to help build narratives is one thing, but collecting something as singular as a place called home was much different. Moments upon moments of a family’s lives had bounced off those walls. Children had run down the street and these buildings were a fixed part of their world as they grew up. They guided them home or were a safe haven for play and sometimes dinner. These shotgun houses were made quickly and cheaply, but they had been the vessel for the very valuable stories we hoped to help bring to others. 


Initially Artstillery hoped to perform
Family Dollar in the homes, an homage to the people who lived there, but that was not to be. Always ambitious we hoped instead to move the homes and rebuild them. We reached out to friends from the architectural firm Mead & Hunt. They helped us grasp the task at hand and to understand more about the homes. 

Community Activist at Lone Star Baptist Church.

      “Our staff from Mead & Hunt’s Dallas office recently teamed up with their local art-based 501c3, Artstillery to salvage materials from historic 60+ year old shotgun houses, which are planned for demo to make room for urban development. Shotgun houses were popular rectangular style homes that popped up after the Civil War in the 1900s and through the 60s. The design of these houses can be traced to Africa and Haiti, and to the US via New Orleans, Florida, and Texas. Materials salvaged from two shotgun houses will be used to rebuild this style home two blocks away to help preserve the history of the homes and the community.” 


-MEAD & HUNT

Facebook Post


Teaching How to Safely Remove a Window.

Once the task was evaluated, Artstillery settled on salvaging what we could and repurposing the pieces into an artistic interpretation of three shotgun homes in a new location. With the help of volunteers young and old, the team deconstructed the houses, saving the outer boards, windows, doors and facades. Community members from West Main Street helped too, laboring with us to save pieces of their own past. The local church,  Lone Star Baptist Church offered to provide land next to the church for the new structures.The church has been a part of this community for generations. It was originally built on June 14, 1939 to serve this small community. It’s long history made it the perfect location for both the structures and the immersive performance piece to occur. 


As we removed the first boards, and felt the literal weight of history, one community member familiar with the project drove by.  She leaned out the window and yelled “Hey y'all, grab that house number off the building. I grew up seeing that every day.”  This passing comment affirmed that the new structures though built with old wood and glass, would really be built with the memories of the community itself. While they will be the “sets” for the performances of Family Dollar, the structures will remain for a time after the performance occurs. They’ll be a public work of art with statements from the community displayed as plaques along with testimonial videos you can access with your smartphone. We encourage everyone in the Dallas area to visit and learn the stories of this community.


Volunteer Prepares to Remove the Last Boards.

THE CAST

& CREW

Rebecca McDonald

KAY

Gelacio Eric Gibson

KENNETH

Priscilla Rice

ROSEMARY

Sorany Gutierrez

"D"

Ava Whatley

ELVIA

Lucila Rojas

LUISA SELENA

Jennifer Culver

Ms. ALICE

Joshua Eguia

DOG (YUMA)

Raven McCarthy

ROOSTER (RED) 

FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHER

Raquel Zamora

ROOSTER (POOCHIE) 


Ilknur Ozgur

WRITER / DIRECTOR

Morgana Wilborn

WRITER / DIRECTOR

Jennifer Culver

WRITER

Jessi Jones

STAGE MANAGER

MIchael W. Cleveland

SOUND DESIGN

Johnny Rutledge

VISUAL DESIGNER / VIDEO

Noel Williams

PUPPET DESIGNER

Gelacio Gibson

ROOSTER COSTUMES

Alisa Eykilis

PHOTOGRAPHY / SET VIDEO

Steve Mitchell

STAGE MANAGER

Sam Brock

PRODUCTION ASSISTANT

Ash Hankins

LEAD CARPENTER

Ilknur Ozgur/Johnny Rutledge/Jessi Jones

SET DRESSING / DESIGN

Hannah Bludworth

DESIGNER

Sam Brock

TECH DESIGN TEAM

Max Torres

PA / VIDEO EDITOR

Chris Lê

ARCHITECT

Mark Sorenson

ARCHITECT

Bryan Oliveira

CINEMATOGRAPHER

Fernando Lucas Urioste

VIRTUAL REALITY CONSULTANT

Patrick Salvant

VIRTUAL REALITY CONSULTANT

Alex Ferrer

VIRTUAL REALITY CONSULTANT

Chris Smith

PRODUCTION RUN CREW

THANK YOUS

The people of the community around W. Main Street, thank you for inviting us in and trusting us with your stories.


Our space sponsors 723, Owenwood Farm & Neighbor, Space  Lone Star Baptist Church. And our beer sponsor Manhattan Project Beer Company.


 Our volunteers, cast and crew.


The Donna Wilhelm Family Fund & Amazon for their generous support.


And the Nasher Sculpture Center as part of Nasher Public.

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